


Dead-end kids, you're not alone

by gaps42



Series: Find yourself and lose it at the rock show [2]
Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/F, F/F Smut, Internalized Homophobia, Pointless fluff, TW - Drug use!!! Pot
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-18
Updated: 2018-09-19
Packaged: 2019-03-06 14:58:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 32,196
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13413705
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gaps42/pseuds/gaps42
Summary: None of her books had prepared her for this, but Jane seems to like her that way.(Nerd!Max, punk!Jane, 1989.)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So this is a continuation of the New Years fic I wrote, but it feels like it's own story so I made it a series, I hope that's not too confusing! This is mostly for @butcheleven, who really wanted them to discuss women's issues and being gay, and they kind of do but it's mostly just them being gay so hopefully that's okay too alsjhhkjlshj
> 
> This is more mature than my other fics, but I mostly upped the rating for them smoking up just to be safe, so warning for pot and making out!!!

When she finally finds Jane the keyboardist is leaning against a corner leading into the back alley behind the club, silhouetted by moonlight and the red glow from the joint pinched between her fingers. She hasn't noticed Max yet, her head tilted back to stare at the hazy night sky as she takes a long pull from the roach, and Max slows her steps, taking her in. She's spent more nights picturing every little detail of Jane than she would like to admit, tracing those pink lips behind closed eyelids as she loses herself in her mix tape she only shamefully retrieves from its hiding place stuffed beneath her pillow once Will has fallen asleep, but somehow all the daydreaming and longing and anxiety has left her unprepared for the reality of Jane, even far away and half-hidden by shadows. That breathless, weak, empty feeling she felt as she watched Jane play, as if she's starving and Jane's music is a feast just out of her reach, comes over her again even though the other girl isn't performing, and Max is half-considering whether she should turn her back on what the thing she's been anticipating most for almost five months when Jane spots her.

"Max," Jane says, and although Max can't see her face there's a smile in her voice. She props one foot against the wall behind her and lowers the hand holding the joint, and the flame from the end illuminates the lop-sided smirk from Max's dreams for a split-second. It's enough to make a mirroring flame flicker to life in the base of Max's belly, and she's pulled forward irresistibly. "I thought you left."

"No," Max says, and then tries not to wince.  _Obviously, wastoid._  "I didn't know where to go after your set," she explains, shoving her hands awkwardly in her jeans pockets when she reaches the corner Jane is leaning against. She doesn't quite know how close to get; she's pictured this moment countless times over the months since she went back to Hawkins, but now that she's here every fantasy, from friendly to brazen, is drowned out by the ringing in her ears from the other girl's presence and she's frozen just outside of Jane's reach.

Jane smiles at her, huge eyes black in the darkness, but doesn't answer Max's statement. "You smoke?" she asks instead, lifting the hand holding the joint and scuffing her Doc Martin boot against the wall it's propped against. "It's pot."

"I know," Max says, a little bit defensively even though there's no judgement in Jane's voice. Jane has never purposefully made her feel stupid or inexperienced in their too-brief, scattered phone calls over the past few months, but she's always aware, painfully now that she's back in the punk girl's overpowering presence, how small-town and foolish she is compared to Jane. From the hints she'd managed to gleam about Jane's past the musician had grown up on the streets, the punk scene and her adoptive sister, the lead singer of her band, her only education, and Max felt like an ignorant child when she thought of her suburban public-school life. She can never hope to be as effortlessly cool as Jane, back arched carelessly against the wall of the club she'd just played in her studded vest and spiked hair, but she hopes feverishly with every conversation she has with Jane that she can continue to ride whatever thing about her Jane is intrigued by and not expose how much of a boring nerd she truly is.

Judging by Jane's smirk she isn't doing a great job, but she barely has time to internally curse herself before the keyboardist says, "Good," takes a long drag of the roach, and pulls Max against her body by her belt loops, opening her chapped lips slowly over Max's gaping ones and breathing smoke into her mouth as they kiss.

Max isn't sure whether the kiss or the smoke is making her head spin more, but she leans into Jane shamelessly, drowning in the feeling. Jane raises one hand to cup her cheek, moving her lips over Max's gently as the smoke dissappates, her raised foot dropping heavily so that Max is standing between her legs. The fingers still curled around Max's belt loop keeps their hips pressed together as she eases their lips apart, drawing back just far enough that the tips of their noses brush as she draws in a slow, shuddering breath. Feverishly grateful for the pull on her jeans, the only thing keeping her upright, Max pants against her lips, eyes closed as she revels in the feelings coursing through her body again, finally, finally.

When she opens her eyes, slow and dreamy, Jane's eyes are smiling at her, bright and endless in the dark night. "Hi."

"Hi," Max says breathlessly. She can't even find it within herself to be embarrassed when Jane smirks, the corner of her pink lips quirking up as she leans her head back against the wall behind her. Jane's eyes drop to Max's lips lazily, raising the joint to her own mouth as she drinks Max in, and Max can't help but shuffle infinitely closer, hands curling in Jane's studded vest as she settles against her body greedily.

Jane turns her head to exhale away from Max's blushing face and then holds the joint out to her, arching an eyebrow. Max takes it; she's already so intoxicated by Jane she doubts it will make a difference. "When did you get to town?" Jane says softly as Max inhales, copying Jane's technique with sudden paranoia she's been holding joints wrong her whole life.

Max exhales up to the sky and coughs a bit, and Jane grins. "This afternoon," Max gulps, hiding her pursed lips behind her fist as her head swims. "Jonathan got Will and me from the bus station and we just hung out at his apartment before the show."

Jane nods, the thumb of the hand still gripping Max's trousers casually starting to rub the redhead's hip in slow circles. She knows of Will and Jonathan from their conversations, although she's never met them in person. "And you are here for the week-end?" she asks.

"And Monday," Max says. "It's all I could get off work." Joyce had scraped together enough money to send Will and Max on a short trip to New York for a graduation present, a bit bewildered when it was all either of them asked for even though they'd be moving there permanently in a few months but supportive nontheless, and although it had only really been bus fare and a bit of pocket money for food Max intended to make enough at her summer job to pay her back before the summer ended. Will loved to point out that this defeated the idea of a  _present_ , but she'd been leeching off the Byers long enough to know that money was scarce and Joyce would do anything for her children, including Max. Basking in Jane's nearness, taking her time drinking in each her sharp, breathtaking features just because she could, Max doesn't think Joyce could have given her a better present if she'd tried, but that only makes her more determined to help the woman who had protected her more than her own mother ever had.

Jane bites her lower lip, and Max abruptly stops thinking about Joyce. “Short trip,” she says, watching Max through her lashes.

“Too short,” Max says with probably too much wistfulness in her voice. “But Joyce wants us around as much as possible this summer, I think she's kind of freaking out. But at least I got to come during one of your shows.” She smiles.

Jane tosses the end of her joint away and wraps both arms around Max's waist, pulling her flush against her body to kiss her. She deepens it when Max gasps, running her tongue along Max's lower lip and delving into her mouth as Max wraps her arms around the taller girl's neck and kisses her back with abandon. The studs from Jane's vest are digging into her chest, her toes are curling in her sneakers so tightly it rolls her forward a bit, and she's never been so aware of every solitary nerve ending in her body, every inch of her lighting up like Joyce's excessive Christmas light display as she meets Jane's lips and tongue again and again and again.

Her head is spinning when Jane pulls back, tightening the hands which have found their way into messy red hair and making Max's eyelashes flutter. “Are you on summer holiday?” she says, voice low and gravelly as she leans their sweaty foreheads together.

Max makes an unintelligible noise in the back of her throat and throws herself at Jane, kissing her greedily. Jane smiles and kisses her back, weaving her fingers in the waves at the back of Max's head and slamming their bruised lips together, and Max moans into her mouth, lost. She can feel the spell in Jane's songs weaving through her body, writhing and heady even without the music, and she presses as close to the source as she can, all instinct as she forgets herself and  _wants_.

Jane drops her arms to wrap around Max's waist again and picks her up, using the momentum to whirl Max around and slam her against the wall and pinning Max with the weight of her body. She tilts her head to kiss Max deeply, one hand moving immediately back to tangled red hair while the other slides over the dip of her waist, fingers flirting with the hem of her t-shirt. Max scrabbles at her back, blunt fingernails sinking into the soft leather of her vest, each kiss only making her hungrier for the next. When Jane finally breaks away from her lips she arches up, blindly chasing her even as she gasps for air like she's been underwater, and Jane's wet, warm lips are smirking as she ducks down to kiss Max's neck.

"Jane," Max gasps, eyelashes fluttering against her cheeks as Jane's lips move lazily over the curve where her shoulder meets her neck.

Jane hums in affirmation against her skin and kisses the hollow of her throat. Max's eyes roll back behind her eyelids; if she'd had anything to say before she'd opened her mouth it's gone now. Her hands curl into fists around the material over the dip of Jane's lower back as Jane leaves a final, open-mouthed kiss on her neck and straightens, calloused fingers finding Max's chin as she presses their lips together, soft and lingering.

"Can't do that over the phone," she says quietly, and although Max still has her eyes closed she can hear the grin in her voice.

Max exhales shakily, her muscles too weak to laugh. "No," she whispers, and then clears her throat. "Definitely not the same as talking."

Jane laughs softly, hands sliding down Max's arms to grip her waist. "I like talking to you," she says. "I just like kissing you, too." She demonstrates by leaning in and capturing Max's lower lip between both of her own, nuzzling their noses together as she pulls away.

Max keeps her eyes closed, lips slightly parted as smoky heat fills her whole body. "I like it too," she says softly.

Jane hums, raising one hand to play with a long strand of Max's hair. "You'll be working all summer?" she murmurs, shuffling her feet so that Max's sneakers are trapped between them.

"Yeah," Max says, although it's a bit more of a breathy groan than the question calls for. She clears her throat again and opens her eyes, which is a mistake because Jane's are dark with the heat and she almost forgets what they're talking about. "Mostly mornings now that it's summer," she adds, mostly to keep herself from kissing Jane again.

Jane wrinkles her nose. Max has had to explain to her, under the watchful eye of an irate Joyce, that 3:00 in the morning was not an appropriate time for a telephone call, so she assumes Jane is not a morning person. "Boring," Jane says, wrapping a strand of Max's hair around one finger and letting it unravel slowly.

Max shrugs. "Yeah, but it helps a lot with paying for school. And I get to read at the counter, so it's not the worst job in the world."

Jane smiles, eyes dropping to Max's lips as she twists the strand of hair almost absently, and Max's knees turn to jelly. "What are you reading?"

Max blushes, even though it's not a particularly personal question. Jane hasn't had any formal education and has confessed she doesn't read for pleasure, and Max always feels her geekiness magnified whenever she gets into one of her enthusiastic rants about literature, even though Jane listens patiently in every phone call. "Just Faust right now," she mumbles, hands sliding around Jane's waist to play with the material over her stomach. "I'm working my way through my literature class book list over the summer, we're supposed to have the whole thing read before class starts."

"Do you like it?" Jane asks. Her eyes are bright with interest, but she's still watching Max's lips so Max isn't sure her focus is on books.

Max shrugs, watching her hands tug on Jane's shirt. "It's beautiful," she says. "I guess. All the great, classic novels by old white men on the list are fine."

Jane snorts, and Max feels her stomach jump with it beneath her hands. "It's all old white men?"

"The whole year's focus is on books by old white men," Max says, so caught up in her irritation she's able to look up into Jane's eyes without throwing herself at the punk girl. "I inquired about it at my admissions meeting, we don't do any women's literature until earliest second year, and even then it's just electives. There isn't even a course about only women writers or women's contribution to literature until fourth year. Fourth year! And even then it's probably all British ladies writing romance novels about women and men. It's like being a vampire."

Jane's forehead pinches in confusion. "Vampire?"

"Yeah." Max blushes, cursing herself for getting so caught up in her rant that she forgets to filter out the weird, hyperbolic thoughts she usually has the presence of mind to keep to herself. "Like, how in the myth, a vampire doesn't have a soul, so they can't see themselves in a mirror. Literature is an exploration and reflection of society, so not seeing myself and my experiences in books... It's like being too monstrous to have a reflection."

Max's voice trails off, eyes dropping back to her hands. She's usually only this raw and exposed in her writing, where she can at least hide behind characters and metaphor to mask her real anxieties, but Jane's overwhelming, intoxicating aura smokes everything she tries to hide about herself out of her. She should be shying away from this, but ever since she first heard Jane's keyboard solo she's been desperately seeking out the weak, greedy, liberating feeling, and she lets Jane raise her chin with callused fingers to meet her eyes now without resistance.

"Max," Jane says with a frown. "You are not a monster. You are the least monstrous person I know." She slows down on the word  _monstrous_ , as if shaping her mouth around the word, but her dark eyes are serious.

"I know," Max says with a weak smile. "It was just an example."

Jane keeps staring at her soleumnly, like she can see through Max's words and into her soul, and Max relents. "It's frustrating. Books have helped me through the worst times of my life, and stories can be such a powerful way to connect with people, but there's always that wall I hit in classics and popular literature. And even when you don't think about it consciously, you feel it when you don't even see things discussed in stories. Like -" She blushes fiercely, but ploughs on under Jane's gaze, "I didn't... I never thought other women wanted to do _this_." She waves a hand between them, slinking down the wall behind her just a little bit.

Jane leans into her, lining up their bodies intimately as she kisses Max. Max's eyes drift closed, arms wrapping around Jane's neck as she kisses back without a thought. Jane's lips are slow, sliding over Max's like she's luxuriating in every second, and Max keeps her eyes closed when the keyboardist pulls back just far enough for the tips of their noses to brush, limbs shaking as she hangs off of the taller girl dizzily.

"Books are not the only way to connect to people," Jane murmurs, presses their foreheads together. "You will have school in New York, but you can also find more than your stories, like you found this." She slides a hand around Max's waist to wave it beside their bodies, copying Max's gesture without moving her body away.

Max grins drunkenly, arching her body into Jane. "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy," she quotes, a bit giddy.

Jane's eyebrows furrow. "Horatio?"

"Nothing." Max rolls up onto her toes to kiss Jane again, and the other girl wraps her arms tightly around her waist and doesn't ask any more questions. Their lips are clumsier now, hungry, and by the time Max is gasping for air while Jane trails open-mouthed kisses over her jawline all traces of embarrassment have been burned out of her by Jane's heat. Her hips roll forward without a thought when one of the keyboardist's hands slides between the hem of her shirt and the top of her trousers, and Jane inadvertently gets her first handful of Max's bare skin when a shout from behind them makes them both jump.

"What the hell, Jane?" It's the drummer from Jane's band; Max thinks Jane called him  _Axe_  in one of their conversations. He looks about ten feet tall with his multicolored mohawk, towering over them in his rage. "Kali's been freaking out about you for half an hour and you're out here fucking some girl?"

"I told her where I was going," Jane frowns, while Max blushes down to her toes, mortified.

"She said you seemed upset and then disappeared," Axe says, crossing his arms over his chest. "I  _told_  her you just fucked off so that you didn't have to help load the van, she still thinks you're a moody twelve-year-old."

"And you looking for me wasn't to avoid loading the van?" Jane retorts, scowling. "Convenient time to start worrying about me."

Max snorts without meaning to, and Axe's narrowed eyes land on her. "Think that's funny, Molly Ringwald? I hope you got your thrills, playing on the wrong side of the street -”

“ _Hey_ ,” Jane says sharply, hands balling into fists as she turns all the way around to face Axe. They have a short, silent conversation, Max feeling strangely intrusive of the obvious familiarity as she looks back and forth between them in confusion, and then Axe rolls his eyes, shoving his hands into the pockets of his tight jeans and rolling back onto the heels of his feet.

“Fine. Finish her off or whatever and meet us back at the van, but I'm leaving you some packing to do. The club is closing.” He gives them one last glare and turns on his heels, marching back towards the stage door and slamming it behind him.

Max and Jane look at each other. “Want to come to the after-party?” Jane says.

Max grins, tucking a lock of hair behind her ear a bit shyly considering Jane had just had a hand up her shirt. “Yeah, cool. My brother Jonathan will probably die of happiness, actually. Oh, you should meet him, and Will. They want to know who you are before I go running around New York with you, their words.” She squeezes her lips together to physically stop her rambling, suddenly very, painfully aware that she'd just assumed that Jane would want to spend the whole week-end with her, when they hadn't planned anything beyond meeting at the show.

But Jane smiles at her, reaching out to weave their fingers together as she starts to lead the way towards the stage door. “Yes. They can come in the van with us. We took the seats out to fit everyone and the equipment.”

Max laughs, mostly from giddiness as their joined hands swing between them. “Jonathan's going to lose his shit. He's probably going to be taking pictures of literally everything. Will's going to be so embarrassed.”

Jane smirks, reaching for the door with the hand not entangled with Max's. The thumb wrapped around Max's knuckles rubs along her skin, almost unconsciously, and as Jane pulls the door open and leads her inside the dark, smoky club, Max catches their distorted reflections in the blacked out window and smiles all the way to the stage.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not really a chapter, just a short thing because I'm kind of obsessed with this AU. @fushiadragon this is for you because you get all sweaty for take-charge musician Jane aghfhlyfshj

Humming tunelessly along with the pop song she'd heard at least four times since her shift had started, Max toys with the corner of a page as her glazed eyes stare down at the book without taking in any words. It's swelteringly hot in the store, the air thick and heavy in her lungs as she takes in a deep, long-suffering breath and huffs it out, the baby hairs which have escaped her messy ponytail curling against her sweaty neck. She'd turned the fan her manager had emphatically told her  _should be turned towards the customers at all times_  to face her on the counter, but all it seemed to be doing was blowing hot air right into her already-flushed face and ruffling the worn pages of her library book obnoxiously. Irritable, Max kicks the bottom rung of the stool she's perched on and stares longingly out the window; her t-shirt is sticking to her sweaty back, she hasn't seen a customer in what feels like hours, and even the fantasy adventure Dustin had wanted her to read so badly he'd physically dragged her to the library to make sure she checked it out couldn't hold her heat-fogged mind for more than a few minutes at a time.

Her gaze strays, yet again, to the telephone on the counter next to her.

Her phone calls with Jane have gotten less sporadic since her last trip to New York, but the more often she got to listen to that husky, quiet voice wash over her through the receiver, the more she craved it. They'd gone from speaking every few weeks, either for whole afternoons or a quick twenty-minute conversation until Jane abruptly said she had to go and hung up without explanation, to a shining, weekly phone call in the evening after Jane knew she would be home from work, and Max had taken to reading at the kitchen table and jumping up to answer the phone on the first ring, usually with a rude gesture in Will's direction as she covered the mouthpiece with her other hand so that Jane couldn't hear him cackling. She had started to wait for Jane to call after her many attempts had only found endless ringing with no answering machine at the other end; Jane seemed to have an unpredictable schedule and wasn't home very often, and with no way to leave her a message Max found it simpler to let Jane call her whenever the other girl thought of it. This was probably also better because, if it were up to Max, they would talk every night, and she didn't want to ruin the precarious  _thing_  she has with Jane before she even moves to the same city. Jane is intriguing and unpredictable and utterly addictive even from several states over, and the more Max has of her, even if it's only a voice and memories of pink lips, the more greedy she becomes. So greedy, in fact, that even though she'd decided that she should wait until Jane calls, even though she'd just had her weekly phone call with Jane three days ago, her hand still reaches of its own accord for the receiver sitting just out of arms reach on the counter.

She slams it down decisively as soon as she hears the dial tone. She's at work, she tells herself fiercely; she has other things to focus on than a girl she'd met twice in another city. Just because she was alone in the store, and she'd finished all of her duties within twenty minutes of her shift starting, and she has nothing to distract her from how much she longs for Jane's voice in her ear - she swings around on the stool as soon as she has the thought, long hair flying as she braces her hands on the counter in front of her and glares down at the yellowed pages of the library book in front of her. If she lets herself start thinking of Jane she'll never have the strength to stay away from the phone, never be able to resist making up a stupid reason for calling that will make Jane laugh that throaty, wicked laugh which always makes Max's toes curl, her voice musical as she forms her questions in her slow, thoughtful way, so careful with her words Max can close her eyes and see them forming on her dizzying, pink lips -

Max has the phone in her hand and it dialing the number she'd memorized months ago before she can stop herself. Jane's probably not even home, she reasons as she traps the receiver between her shoulder and ear while it rings dully. It's the middle of the day, and Jane's not expecting her call; she'll listen to the phone ringing over and over, stamp down the disappointment she knew was coming when the error messages plays after too many rings, and then she can concentrate on her book without the possibility of talking to Jane taunting her in the back of her -

"Yeah?"

Max starts, almost falling off the stool in her surprise before she hooks her feet around the bottom rung and rolls her eyes at herself. "Oh, um, hi. Is Jane there?"

"Jane?" The voice is female and vaguely familiar, but she can't quite remember who it belongs to. She'd met all of Jane's band-mates at the afterparty, but the only one who had done more than grunt in greeting and shoot her suspicious looks was Kali, the lead singer, and this voice was harsher even over the crackling line. "Why do you want Jane? Who is this?"

Before Max can think of a way to describe who she is to Jane, she hears in the background the voice which makes goosebumps erupt across her skin despite the hot temperature. "Me?"

"Yeah, apparently," the woman on the phone says irritably, not bothering to cover the mouthpiece as she speaks to Jane. "You've gotta stop giving this number to random girls, it's way too easy to track people through phone lines."

Max's stomach sinks at the thought of Jane giving countless other girls her number, and she's trying not to think about what else they did together that Jane undoubtedly does with the other girls when Jane says, confused. "I didn't. Can I talk?"

There's a long silence filled only by the line crackling and fuzzing, and Max is about to say something to confirm they didn't hang up when Jane's voice fills her ear, low and somehow even more musical than Max remembers, "Yes?

Max closes her eyes, a grin spreading over her lips irresistibly as she lets Jane's voice wash over her. "Hi, Jane," she says quietly.

"Max," Jane says, and there's a smile in her voice now. Max's toes curl in her sneakers so tightly it pushes her feet against the metal rung on the stool and her knees rise. "Aren't you at work?"

"Yeah," Max says, although it comes out as more of a sigh. She feels like she's been holding tension in her muscles since the last time she'd spoken to Jane and it's only now being released, and her knee starts bouncing loosely. "There's no one here, and I'm bored."

Jane laughs, soft and husky, and warmth swirls through Max's stomach like lava, very different from the heat of the day. "Working is boring."

"Yeah, but I've got to get through school somehow." Max hunches her shoulder to hold the receiver to her ear as she wipes her suddenly-sweaty palms on her jeans. "What are you guys doing?"

"Nothing. Dottie and Axe are playing darts. I don't want to do anything because it's too hot."

"God, I know," Max groans, tilting her head backwards as she grips the phone with slightly-shaky fingers. "it's insane here too. I'm pretty sure all our customers are hiding in their air-conditioned homes. I haven't seen anyone on the street all day, and I don't blame them."

Jane snickers, and her voice is mischievous when she says, "If there isn't anyone there you could leave."

Max's stomach coils at her tone, and she has to clear her throat before she can trust herself to speak. "I wish. My boss would kill me, though. Knowing my luck the one mouth-breather who would actually go out in this weather tries to buy something and reports me for not being here."

Jane hums, sounding amused, but pauses before asking, "Mouth-breather?"

"Yeah." Max twists the phone cord around her pointer finger. "Like, a stupid person. Obnoxious mouth-breathing."

Jane laughs outright, the line crackling at the sudden change in volume, and Max's stomach flutters at the sound. In the background she can hear a male voice shout something she can't quite make out, and Jane calls back, "On the phone, mouth-breather!"

Max bursts out laughing, covering half of her face with the hand not holding the phone. God, she was so screwed. "You got it," she grins, leaning her elbows on the counter.

Jane snickers while the voice in the background shouts irritably. "Do you still get paid if you have no customers?" she asks.

"Well, yeah," Max says, pulling the phone cord across her upper lip like a mustache. "I'm mostly paid to be here, so I get money whether I'm helping customers or not, which is why I sit on my ass and read most of the time."

"That's good," Jane says. "Not reading today?"

Max glances down at the book she currently has an elbow propped on. "I can't get into this one," she says, half-truthfully. "Dustin recommended it, so I'm sure I'll like it eventually, but it's pretty standard fantasy so far."

"Not an old white man book?" Jane says curiously.

Max laughs, shoulders shaking as she covers her eyes with one hand. "I mean, it probably is, but not for school," she smiles.

"Taking a break from reading with more reading?" Jane teases.

"You know it," Max says with a goofy grin, unable to care about what a nerd she was being as her whole body flushes with Jane's laugh. "This is reading for pleasure, very different."

Jane hums, and Max can picture her devastating pink lips twisted into a smirk. "Wouldn't know," she says, voice low and husky and just for Max. "Not what I do for pleasure."

Max doesn't drop the phone, but it's a close thing. Her heart is pounding like the intoxicating beat of Jane's music in her stomach as she readjusts herself on the stool, and even though she clears her throat before she speaks her voice still breaks when she says, "Oh, uh, no?"

"No," Jane confirms, and the smugness in her voice makes Max swallow hard and squeeze her knees together on reflex. "But if it's your pleasure I can try when you move here."

"Uh, reading?" Max says, stupidly, because her eyes are closed and all she can see is the image of Jane's lips slowly, purposefully forming each teasing word just out of her reach. She takes in a shaky breath and whines when she can almost taste the memory of Jane's lips from the mere mention of pleasure.

"Yes," Jane says, voice serious. "As long as you try mine."

The coil in her stomach tightens almost unbearably, and her hips shift forward eagerly even though she knows Jane is not there. "Jane," she says, and her voice is raw and naked with all of the need she's been working so hard to hide from Jane. "Don't - don't tease me."

"I'm not," Jane says quietly. "How soon can you move here?"

Max exhales, but it comes out as a whine. Her elbow slips off of the book and lands heavily on the counter and she leans over, her over-heated skin prickling as the cooler surface soaks through her thin t-shirt. "Jesus," she says without meaning to. "I mean - Not for a few months. August. I think. When I get there, you - You still want - We can -"

"We can do whatever we want," Jane says.

The bell over the door makes her jump, almost falling off the stool as she flails to catch herself with shaky limbs. The phone goes flying from her sweaty hands, and she doesn't want to think about what her face is doing as she avoids the customer's surprised gaze and dives after it, whole body burning like the surface of the sun. She drops the phone as soon as she scoops it up, her hand is shaking so badly, and she ducks her head to avoid the customer's gaze as she hisses, "IhaveacustomerIhavetogo," into the receiver and slams it down onto the cradle before Jane can finish her confused response.

She sinks back onto the stool on shaky legs, staring aggressively down at the counter without seeing. "Hello, can I help you find anything?" she mumbles.

The customer refuses her help with a bewildered glance, and Max squeezes her knees together as she buries her glowing face in her sweaty palms. If she'd thought talking to Jane would help to alleviate the desperate pressure in her belly she couldn't have been more mistaken, and her stool squeaks as she readjusts her hips guiltily, Jane's voice seared into her overheated brain. She thinks, vaguely, that she should probably call Jane back to apologize for hanging up on her, but, as she feels a shiver run through her tensed body despite the summer heat, all her mind seems capable of thinking about is all of the possibilities for  _whatever we want_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I genuinely didn't mean to write it like this but I love that Jane's like "ahahahaha but seriously though when r we bangin can we set a date or"  
> I probably won't have much internet access this week-end but Constellations should be up early next week!!! Thank you for every kudos and comment I can't believe anyone's actually reading these, I'm???<3


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi!!! Remember these two?  
> I'm posting two chapters at once because the one below is more of an introduction??? I guess because I don't know if I made it clear that there would be smut in this story. Max exploring her sexuality with Jane kind of *is* the story so it's going to get mature up in here and I want to make sure people are comfortable with that!!! I don't think it gets too explicit, it's more about how Max feels than anything, but if you don't want to read about elmax banging I totally understand and I just want to make sure I'm not sexually harrassing the elmax fandom, so be warned!!!<3 This chapter isn't smutty so you can go ahead and read it and then go back to Max getting the vapors from standing next to El in Constellations if that's your jam ashljhs;fls

Heart pounding so hard it threatens to beat out of her chest, Max takes one last, frantic look around the dark living room and sinks down onto the couch.

Her hands are shaking so badly she can barely hold her walk-man. She winces and glances around again when the cassette rattles loudly against the plastic door as she tries to shove it into the machine, but the house is still silent aside from her awkward fumbling. Huffing out a frustrated breath, she snaps the door of the walk-man shut decisively and picks up her headphones, purposefully shoving them over her ears with the least amount of ceremony she can.

The end of summer is fast approaching, and Jane's band had embarked on an impromptu tour with another band they'd befriended to the last punk and metal outdoor music events in New York before the weather got too cold. Jane had assured her that they would be back not long after her semester started, but she couldn't give an end date and Max suspected the disappointment and anxiety she hadn't been able to hide even over the phone had prompted the keyboardist to send her a tape of their new set for the tour in the mail as compensation. It wasn't the same as hearing Jane's low chuckle through the phone line just for her, let alone feeling it against her lips as Jane kissed her like she wouldn't be doing for who knew how long, but opening the cassette in the unmarked envelope and seeing the notecard through the tinted plastic casing, covered with Jane's careful, messy scrawl made her hands shake and her belly clench with anticipation so sinful she'd stuffed the tape into her pocket so that Joyce wouldn't see it and waited for cover of darkness before she'd let herself pull it out to listen.

This, she muses, as she pushes play with her thumb and closes her eyes as drumbeats roll in her ears, is what her problem always comes back to. She's greedy for Jane, shaky and weak like she's starving, and any taste, even as small as listening to her music from several states away, only makes her hungrier. There's a wildness to how Jane makes her feel, and more than being overwhelming Jane makes her  _want_  to be overwhelmed and Max doesn't quite know how to stop embarrassing herself in front of the person she wants more than anything.

As always, her mind slows and heady warmth pools in the pit of her stomach as she hears the keyboard introduce a new song with cascading chords, and she lets the lyrics wash over her as Kali's soft, heart-felt voice mixes with the instruments.

_Well I don't hardly know her_

_But I think I could love her_

_Crimson and clover_

Max's eyes snap open. Jane's voice, quiet but distinctive even mixing seamlessly with the rest of the band, harmonizes in the background between Kali's lines, and Max's heart picks up speed so suddenly at the sound her body jerks with it. Jane has sung for her before, over the phone when she tries to explain what her band is working on and doesn't have the proper words, and her voice is low and rich and so beautiful Max can only ever close her eyes and let it vibrate over her body like a caress. She knows the keyboard-heavy songs are usually written or arranged by Jane, and even though it's Kali's voice crooning the gentle words into her ear she can hear Jane behind the flowing music and simple lyrics, and she closes her eyes and stretches over the back of the couch with a shaky breath.

_Ah, when she comes walking over_

_I've been waiting to show her_

_Crimson and clover_

_Over and over_

The keyboard takes over, starting low and tantalizing, and Max feels the sinful effect in her belly as the music builds, picking up speed as each chord is accentuated by new notes until the instrumental break becomes a wild, crashing, writhing cumulation of all of the instruments so explicit Max squirms with it on the couch guiltily. The drums pound with her heartbeat and then the music breaks, reveling in the peak the instruments had been rushing towards together before Kali's voice takes over once more.

_Yeah, I'm not such a sweet thing_

_I want to do everything_

Max's breath catches in her throat, and she presses a hand over her mouth even though she hasn't made a sound. Although she knows it's ridiculous to think that Jane had arranged and performed an entire song with her band directed at Max herself she can't help but see herself in the story being told through the song. She barely knows Jane, but everything about the keyboardist makes her  _want_  so badly she loses her head and gives in every time. She's spent the summer fantasizing about what  _everything_  could mean, and although it's obvious Jane has done this before and isn't nearly as obsessive and anxious about it as Max is, Jane has made it clear that she wants her, enough to only flirt over the phone for months and still promise her every time that she'll show Max what she means by  _Whatever we want_  when Max finally comes to New York. The thought has carried her through the summer, making her toes curl deliciously at the thought even as her stomach clenches with the unknown, and she smiles as the next line of the song catches her whirlwind of thoughts in that succinct way Jane's music always seemed to be able to capture what she means better than her own expansive vocabulary of words could.

_What a beautiful feeling_

Max sinks bonelessly onto the coach, feeling as if she's finally exhaled a breath she's been holding since she first kissed Jane, and she lets her thoughts wander with a freedom she's never had before as the song picks up again, instruments and lyrics pounding repeatedly together as she pictures Jane's smirking, pink lips singing the lyrics just to her.

_Crimson and clover_

_Over and over_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Max is the hottest gay mess I've ever seen and I would die for her  
> Next chapter's up but again, be warned that there's smut!!!


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry I'm just really nervous no one is looking for this so warning again for smut!!!

As soon as the bedroom door is closed Jane is kissing her. She pins her to the wood with her body, cold surface jarring as her body is engulfed in flames from Jane's closeness, and Max gasps into her mouth, shaking fingers curling in the worn leather of her jacket as she pulls her closer. Her heart pounds in her ears, so loudly their gasping breaths sound like they're underwater, and she's almost grateful when Jane breaks away from her lips to begin kissing down her neck and she doesn't have to try to focus through the fog in her brain to kiss her back anymore. She sucks on her own bottom lip, eyes rolling back in her head before she stops herself at the taste of Jane on her lips, and she arches her neck into Jane's kisses, hands sliding up her back towards her neck hesitantly before thinking better of it and dropping back to Jane's waist.

"Come here," Jane mumbles into her skin, tugging on the buttons of Max's flannel as she begins walking backwards. She raises her face to kiss Max again, hard and greedy, and Max's legs shake so much they almost collapse out from under her as she follows Jane helplessly towards the bed. Jane pulls her down onto the mess of blankets and she jumps, almost slamming her forehead into Jane's nose when the keyboardist leans in to kiss her again. Jane looks at her with wide eyes, and she lunges forward hurriedly, pressing her lips against the musician's and trying to concentrate through both the clouds of embarrassment and  _want_  threatening to settle over her brain.

She's blushing when Jane draws back to lean their foreheads together, still hovering close enough that Max feels the puff of her breath on her face as she laughs. "Max, it's just me," she says quietly.

"Exactly," Max groans, covering her burning face with her palms. "It's  _you_."

Jane's fingers tug at Max's wrists gently, but Max keeps her palms stubbornly over her face. "What do you mean?" Her voice is still soft, but uncertainty colors her words as her hands hesitate over Max's.

"You -" Max groans, leaning her body into Jane's without taking her hands away from her eyes, and Jane's strong, solid arms wrap around her immediately. "You're so -" She buries her face in Jane's shoulder and waves her hand down the other girl's body vaguely, embarrassment battling with arousal in her stomach as Jane runs a hand patiently over her back and says nothing. "I want you so much," she confesses in a whisper, voice muffled in Jane's shoulder. "You make me so... I've thought about this so many times, planned exactly how it was going to go in my head, and now that you're finally here I'm a mess."

Jane grins into her temple. "You planned?"

"God, don't make fun of me," Max groans, and Jane's stomach shakes against hers with her silent laughter. She pulls back to cup Max's cheek and leads her in a soft kiss, and Max's eyes flutter closed despite her anxiety.

"We are going to do whatever we want," Jane mumbles against her lips, and her arousal wins for a dizzy split-second as she presses closer to Jane's firm body and sighs shakily against her lips. "Which means only what we want, and not what we don't."

"I know," Max breathes, barely conscious of what she's saying as Jane tilts her head and their noses brush together. "But you make me..." There are no words for what Jane makes her feel, which is the crux of her problem, and she trails off hopelessly, breath shuddering as Jane trails a warm thumb across her cheek. "I can't think when I'm with you," she breathes.

"That's good," Jane murmurs, and swallows Max's scoff with a deep kiss. By the time she pulls back Max is panting, eyes squeezed shut as she clutches Jane's jacket to ground herself, and there's a smile in her voice when she continues, barely audible over the ringing in Max's ears, "This isn't homework. There's no right answer. Just what you want. What do you want?"

Max shakes her head slowly, award-winning vocabulary and eloquence defeated by Jane's simple touch. "You," she whispers.

Jane leans in to kiss her again. Max wraps her arms around Jane's neck, flowing into her lap as she kisses her back greedily, but her embarrassment seizes her stomach with cold fists again as her thighs slide around Jane's hips and she's suddenly very aware of where she is. She blushes and shifts awkwardly, trying to picture the poses of the girls in magazines she'd shamefully stolen from Billy and her teen-age boy friends over the years, and she doesn't notice she's stopped kissing Jane until the other girl pulls back, panting hotly against her cheek for a moment before opening glazed brown eyes to search her face with concern.

Max ducks her head to avoid her gaze, letting her long hair fall in front of her face, although Jane is so close it frames both of their cheeks. "This is so much easier in books," she blurts out, and then squeezes her eyes shut painfully as she considers whether her legs are too shaky for her to just get up and leave.

"There are books about sex?" Jane says, sounding surprised.

Max giggles, a bit hysterically, and lifts her arms to press her hands over her face again. Jane catches her wrists and holds them, and even though she's still straddling the keyboardist's lap the gentle stroke of her thumbs across the sensitive inside of her wrist sends a jolt of warmth through her whole body, melting the anxiety in her belly enough to loosen her lips. "Uh, y-yeah, there - I mean, there are books  _about_  sex, I'm sure, but in the books I read they just - they fall into bed after - after getting to know each other and it's this pivotal moment where all of the tension between them breaks and everything's perfect and it's like finally -" She realizes she's rambling and clamps her mouth shut, wincing as the silence settles around them louder than her words. She tries to shuffle backwards, but Jane tightens her hands around her wrists and won't let her go. "It just happens exactly like it should, and I don't know how to do that," she says quietly. "I know - I know it's whatever we both want, and I've been thinking about that all summer, but doing it is... More confusing and I can't think."  _I don't know how to know what you want,_  she thinks miserably, but mercifully she at least manages to keep this final, humiliating thought to herself.

Jane releases her wrists to wrap her arms around her back, and she lets herself be dragged into Jane's body, weak for the keyboardist even in her humiliation. "Max," she says softly, and Max's eyes are drawn to hers irresistibly despite her whole body tensing. "You think too much," Jane says seriously.

Max sputters a laugh, more out of surprise than humor. "You can't think  _too much_. And trust me, I'm not thinking enough right now." She blushes with her whole body, eyes dropping to her hands playing nervously with the material covering Jane's stomach.

Jane's hands slide over her lower back, drawing meaningless shapes in tantalizing fire even over her shirt. "There's no plan, or book we have to follow," she says softly, and Max can't help the reflective tensing of her thighs as she feels the vibration of Jane's voice from her body, even through her embarrassment. "You can concentrate on you, and me, and now. You don't need to think about me any more. I'm here. Just feel."

Max flattens her palms over Jane's stomach, wondering if her dizziness is from the force of her blush or Jane's words. "What does that mean?" she whispers.

Jane shrugs and slides her hands over the dip of Max's waist to cradle her cheeks, leaning in to kiss her deeply. Max drowns in her, body melting into Jane as the heat of her burns through the cold tension in her muscles, and she keeps her eyes closed when Jane finally draws back, drifting. "How does that feel?" Jane says softly, running her thumbs along Max's cheekbones.

Max lets out a shaky breath, eyelashes fluttering against her blushing cheeks. "Good."

Jane slides a hand into her hair and pulls her forward again. Max opens her lips to Jane's tongue eagerly, using the momentum from her hands fisting in Jane's jacket to pull their bodies flush together as she kisses her back with abandon. Jane raises her other hand to weave in her tangled waves as their tongues slide over each other, and Max moans, head swimming as her hips move of their own accord against Jane. Their bodies slide against each other as slow and tantalizingly as their mouths, and Max's shaky thighs give out on her completely when Jane's warm fingers slide over the top curve of her backside to slip beneath the back of her flannel shirt.

"How does that feel?" Jane murmurs into her mouth, smiling even has her voice comes much more gravelly than usual.

"So good," Max says breathlessly, and kisses her hard. She can feel the pull Jane's music has had over her since the first moment she heard it, deep and overpowering and addictively freeing, and she presses closer, body rolling with the feeling instinctively like she had on the dance floor. Jane's hands slide further up her back with the movement and she gasps into the keyboardist's mouth, every inch of her skin lighting up as those soft fingers dance over her.

Jane sucks her bottom lip and digs her fingertips into Max's back, trailing her hands over her shoulderblades like she's playing one of her complex runs on her keyboard. Max moans at the half-thought, arching her back into Jane's hands mindlessly as she feels the notes across her skin, and Jane's lips turn possessive as one hand slides abruptly down the curve of her lower back to grip her backside and thrust their hips together hard. The movement sends shockwaves through Max's whole body and she shakes, wrapping her thighs around Jane's waist and hooking her knees together against the other girl's back to try to touch as much of Jane as possible.

The shift of her weight throws them off-balance, but Jane keeps kissing her when she tenses, those burning-hot lips melting her thoughts before they have a chance to form, and the keyboardist lowers her backwards onto the bed slowly, holding their bodies together with the hand squeezing her backside as the other slides over her back in a gentle caress. Max kisses her with abandon, losing herself immediately to her taste and her tongue, and she lets out another little, helpless moan without meaning to when Jane's weight settles over her.

“Fuck,” Jane breathes. She kisses Max once, firm and quick, and pulls back, the hand on her back gliding over her ribs and down her heaving stomach before sliding out from beneath her shirt to the mattress beside her. Panting, Jane leans her weight on the hand on the mattress, the other hand squeezing her ass greedily, and she tilts her hips upwards, pressing the apex of her thighs against Jane's stomach as best she could without loosening her legs from around Jane's hips.

Jane brushes their noses together, teasing Max's searching lips by hovering just out of her reach. “Still good?” she whispers, voice hoarse.

“Jane,” Max moans. Her eyelashes flutter, but she can't seem to remember how to open her eyes. “You feel so good.”

Jane kisses her immediately, hot and open-mouthed and so hard their teeth almost knock together, and Max's head rolls back as she arches up into her, trying to press impossibly closer. Jane pushes her into the mattress with her body, sliding both hands over the blankets until they reach Max's mass of hair above them, and her weight on top of Max, every inch of her firm, lithe, breath-taking body lined up with Max's, pulls a desperate, throaty groan out of somewhere deep inside of her she'd never felt before. She feels it vibrate through both of their bodies, and that heady dance which has always started and ended with Jane writhes inside of her and pulls her hips into a brainless, greedy rhythm against the other girl.

Jane pants against her lips and clenches one hand in her hair, pulling sharply as her possessive tongue delves into Max's mouth, and Max bucks up into her helplessly. When Jane breaks away from her mouth she tries to call her name, but her wet, bruised lips are are as slow and clumsy as her mind and she can only make a throaty, desperate noise which she might have been embarrassed about if she was able to feel anything except Jane. Searing-hot lips travel hastily over her jaw and down her neck, and she rolls her head back with the tug from Jane's hand in her hair, loosening her strangled hold on Jane with her legs only when the other girl begins sliding downwards, not moving their bodies apart an inch as she kisses her way down Max's throat.

She kisses the hollow of Max's throat and sits up, and Max's whole body jerks, sweat-slicked hands scrambling over her back to try to pull the keyboardist down to her. Jane dips down to kiss her softly, and her hands get trapped between their bodies when she raises them to the buttons on Max's shirt as they kiss and the redhead wraps her arms around Jane's shoulders to keep her close.

“Max,” Jane smiles against her lips, nuzzling her nose as she fiddles with a button pointedly.

“Wanna kiss you,” Max mumbles mindlessly, emphasizing her point with a wet, greedy press of her mouth to Jane's.

Jane hums and kisses her back. “Sit up,” she says, voice so low and deep Max would have wanted to do anything she said without thought, and she lets Max hang off of her as she shifts to her knees and pulls them backwards slowly. Her hands slide over the curve of Max's ass to the bottom of her shirt again, but she pulls back from Max's insistent, drunk kisses for a split-second to pull the flannel shirt over her head. She pulls their bodies flush together and kisses her hard as soon as the shirt is over her tangled red waves, and Max is all instinct as she spreads her legs and rolls her body in Jane's lap.

Jane slides a hand up her spine and plays with the clasp of her bra, long eyelashes tangling with Max's as they kiss. “How does that feel?” she murmurs, forming each word slow and messy against Max's panting mouth.

Max moans, fingernails scraping down her back. She can feel every detail of Jane's leather jacket against her chest, the soft leather and sharp teeth of the chest pocket poking through her thin bra, and the sensation makes her head spin. She leans her forehead against Jane's, trying to remember how to form words, and the movement brushes their chests together, her breasts flattening against the lapels of Jane's jacket and spilling over the cups a bit as their bodies press together. Her mouth goes slack as she watches them rock together, her hard nipples dragging against the soft leather through her cotton bra, and it's only Jane's hard, steamy kiss which can make her look away.

“Still good?” Jane says, one hand caressing her lower back and the other weaves through the messy waves over her shoulders. She's smiling, moving her own chest against Max's tortuously slowly, but her glazed eyes are soft and curious.  
“Jane,” Max gasps. She swallows and shakes her head slowly, hazy eyes dropping to Jane's pink lips. “Fuck. God. Better than good.”

Jane grins wickedly and pulls her in for a deep, slow kiss. Max drowns in her, rubbing their chests together shamelessly, and she grips the lapels of Jane's jacket and tugs the other girl forward forcefully when Jane begins leaning her back down towards the bed. Her hands are shaking too badly to pull the jacket off of Jane's shoulders, and she blushes when Jane pulls back to shrug it off after she's laid Max down, even as her stomach swoops dizzily at the sight.

Her body melts at Jane's kiss. She wraps her limbs around the other girl, rocking their bodies together again as she squeezes her thighs around Jane's waist, and it's Jane's turn to moan into her mouth. One of Jane's hands trails a line of fire over her skin as it travels over her bare stomach and up her ribs, and she's too lost to keep kissing Jane as she arches her back to let the keyboardist slip her hand beneath her to the clip on her bra. Breathless, burning, she lets her eyes drift closed as Jane presses her mouth against the underside of her chin and gently pulls the straps of her bra down her shoulders. The keyboardist has to pull away a bit to get rid of the article of clothing, and Max's eyes snap open without a thought, only relaxing again when Jane's weight settles back over her and warm, sloppy kisses resume their blazing trail over her chin.

She tries to close her eyes again, but the moment has shifted her brain into gear and she's suddenly very aware of how awkward her clinging limbs are, like a baby koala. She blushes and shifts, hands moving tentatively over Jane's spine as the other girl slowly kisses down her sternum, and she jumps a bit at the acute awareness of how good it feels when Jane kisses the valley between her breasts. Jane pauses, but Max arches into her mouth stubbornly, lifting her head in the hope that seeing Jane will throw her back into the dreamy twilight where her body seemed to know what to do even when her mind didn't. Watching her glossy dark head move over the curve of one breast makes her heart speed up, but she's strangely separated from the sensation, like she's concentrating so hard on how to enjoy what she's doing that she can't experience it. She feels like she's been thrown into one of her fantasies, where she keeps plotting and changing what they would be doing from the outside and trying to imagine what it should feel like without feeling anything, and her body is shaking as she tries not to think of the other girls Jane has had in her bed after a show who undoubtedly know the elusive secret to making a fantasy a reality when Jane presses a soft kiss just beside her nipple and looks up, warm hands gentle on her jumping stomach. “Still good?” Jane says softly.

She's so beautiful, soft brown eyes contrasting starkly against her lightly-flushed skin, and Max swallows and reaches for her. “Kiss me,” she whispers, and Jane moves up her body without hesitation and kisses her deeply. She's still greedy, lips moving eagerly over Max's despite having every reason not to, and Max curls her fingers in the material over her stomach and pulls her closer, luxuriating in everything about her. Jane's weight settles back over her, lithe body pressing into her just enough to make her dizzy, and she gasps and opens her mouth to Jane's, arching her neck and pulling her impossibly closer when Jane teases her lips with her tongue. She sinks into Jane, any worries or thoughts or pride she might have had left melting away under the heat of their kisses, and she doesn't notice her thighs wrapping shamelessly around the keyboardist's hips again until Jane slides a palm over the curve of her hip and smiles.

“You're beautiful,” Jane murmurs against her lips and kisses her hard, leaning her weight onto one forearm beside Max's face so that her other hand can explore the outside of her thigh.

Jane is the most breath-takingly beautiful woman she's ever seen, but Max is too drunk on her kisses to form words again so she slides one hand over Jane's ribs to her shoulder and digs her blunt fingernails into the muscle there, moaning. Jane had been wearing a sleeveless black shirt under her jacket, and Max slides her palm down the bare skin of her arm appreciatedly before she reaches Jane's hand on her hip and weaves their fingers together, sliding their joined hands over the top of her thigh to the inside of her knee and then down her inner thigh as much as she can without taking her leg away from Jane's body until their fingers brush where her thigh meets her pelvic bone.

“Jane,” she whispers, and she shivers with pleasure just from the name. “I want you. Touch me.”

Jane takes a shuddering breath and kisses her hard. She returns it eagerly, lifting her shaking hands to Jane's back and arching into her body when Jane's hands start moving immediately over her prickling skin. Her body bursts to life everywhere Jane touches, each cell lighting up at the brush of Jane's hand, and Jane's hands are  _everywhere_ , following the lines and curves of Max's body while her lips stay firmly on Max's gasping ones. By the time her capable fingers reach the button on her jeans Max is a writhing, panting mess beneath her, and Jane grins into Max's needy kisses when the redhead tries to wriggle her trousers down her hips without loosening her legs from around the musician's hips.

“Max,” Jane says softly, running her palms down the outside of her thighs.

“Jane,” Max moans, rolling her body along Jane's and not helping at all.

Jane kisses her forcefully, using the distraction to ease herself out of Max's tight grip and begin tugging her jeans down her quaking legs. She shifts to move from between Max's legs, but Max bends her knees and kicks the clothing off eagerly, too intoxicated by Jane's kisses to care about how awkward she looked, and Jane smiles into her panting mouth when she pulls Jane back on top of her impatiently.

Jane's talented hands explore the newly-exposed skin the same way, lighting a trail along her sensitive flesh as she teases and tortures Max's tongue with her own, but her hands are greedier now, fingers flexing and digging into the soft curves of her legs as if she's trying to touch all of her at once. She ends up at the apex of Max's thighs much more quickly than when the trousers had been in the way and when she cups Max over her underwear neither of them are sure whose groan vibrates between their lips.

“Jane,” Max moans, lifting her hips.

“How does that feel?” Jane says in a low voice, hot mouth sliding over Max's dizzyingly.

Max rubs herself shamelessly against Jane's palm, sure she can feel how wet she is through her underwear. “God, Jane, so good,” she groans, and wraps her arms drunkenly around Jane's neck to pull her down for a needy kiss.

Their bodies slide against each other as Jane sinks her teeth gently into Max's bottom lip, and Max thinks a bit wildly that this was the dance Jane's music had been giving her tempting, intoxicating glimpses of all along when Jane presses the heel of her hand gently into Max's folds and she stops thinking at all. She gasps and bucks, grinding down shamelessly into Jane's hand when the musician smirks and kisses her hard, and she feels the pressure of Jane's palm lighting up her whole body from between her legs as Jane begins sliding her palm in a gentle rhythm.

Her lips become too clumsy to kiss Jane back, and she pants into her kisses, head rolling back as her body arches into Jane's helplessly. Jane ducks her head to begin kissing down her body, but Max feels a jolt of panic and tightens her arms around Jane's neck, dragging her back up to her face and pressing their lips together artlessly. Jane settles over her without hesitation and kisses her panting lips, tilting her head to trail kisses along the bruised lower lip as she keeps up her teasing rhythm between her legs seamlessly, and Max moans, revelling in the overpowering sensations rolling through every inch of her shaking body.

Jane shifts, curling her hand so that the soaked heel of her hand brushes against her clit, and Max cries out, body arching off the bed. Jane chuckles into her mouth and slides the arm supporting her weight beneath the dip of Max's lower back, biting Max's lip as she does it again. Max lets out a strangled noise and rubs herself against Jane's palm, and Jane presses their bodies together, gently leading Max's rocking body with the pressure of her own. “How does that feel?” she mumbles against Max's lips, breath coming more quickly now as she flexes her hand against Max's folds.

Max moans, heavy hair tumbling around her face as she arches her neck so much she pushes off from the mattress. She hangs off of Jane's lithe body, eyelashes fluttering with every stroke of Jane's hand, and her toes curl when the other girl nips her bottom lip harder than before.

“Max,” Jane grounds out, pressing her hard into the mattress with her firm body as her wet fingers push ruined cotton into dripping folds, “tell me how it feels.”

Max gasps, rocking her hips into Jane's hand as her whole body lights up at the sound of her voice. “So good,” she moans, barely conscious of what she's saying, words slurred as they catch on her bruised lips. “Amazing. I'm – Oh – You feel -” Her body writhes, heart pounding between her legs, and as she rides Jane's hand, wild and uncoordinated and focused on nothing but what Jane makes her feel, her eyes roll back into her head and all of the tension from every inch of her shaking body pools in her belly and coils dangerously.

She thinks,  _Jane_ , and her orgasm crashes through her body all at once.

She should probably be embarrassed about how long she lies there, shaking and weightless and barely breathing through the giddiness in her chest, but with Jane laying above her, solid and quiet and more real than anything she's ever had, she lets her lover press soft, pink kisses into her blushing skin and just feels.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *Hesitant jazz hands*  
> It's my first time please be gentle ashljshkgl;fl omg seriously though anybody reading this at all makes my week


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Listen... I have no excuse for this, apparently this is what happens when I'm grumpy with Constellations and school stuff now  
> Here there be smut, smutty smut actually this time kinda

Warm and drifting, Max thinks, a bit dreamily, that she finally understands all the fuss about kissing.

It's not that she has never enjoyed it before; the act of kissing was probably the one thing she had actually liked when she had tried to push past the reluctance and general disinterest with boys in the past, but it had always been about the kissing itself, the feeling of lips on hers and the different sensations each brush and press could bring out of her sensitive skin. It was a different kind of touching, pleasant in the same way holding hands or being wrapped in someone's arms was, but in the same way the other kinds of touching she enjoyed well enough were, she had never considered them particularly sexual or intimate.

Lying under Jane, tasting the punk girl's saliva on her tongue as she felt the stoke of her lips through every inch of her crackling body, Max realizes this is what  _kissing_  is.

It's not like she's never kissed Jane before – they had barely said multiple sentences to each other before Jane had kissed her for the first time – and every kiss with Jane has been significant, world-tilting and toe-curling and so addictive she woke from feverish dreams in the middle of the night with Jane's name on her lips, but here, in Jane's bed, gloriously aware of her own nudity as she arches up into the other girl's drugging mouth and feels her bare torso brush soft cotton, she understands where the turn between sweet to sexual begins.

A thrill runs across her oversensitive flesh at the thought, and she realizes, dizzily, for the first time she  _wants_  it to.

“Jane,” she breathes, and pulls the other girl down forcefully on top of her by her t-shirt. Her kiss is messy, slow and artless from her orgasm, but Jane takes control of the kiss without missing a beat, leading her clumsy lips through deep, plundering kisses which make her toes curl. Her feet slide over Jane's calves with the movement and she's reminded that Jane is still dressed while she only has the barrier of her underwear between them, and she slides her knees up the outside of her lover's slim hips, hooking her ankles around the other girl's waist and pushing at her studded belt with curled toes uselessly.

“Off,” she pants, fumbling with the back of Jane's t-shirt drunkenly as she tries to undress her without moving their bodies apart.

Jane pulls back immediately, panting and flushed. “Off you -?”

“No!” Max gasps, and pulls her back down, wrapping her limbs around the punk girl's torso tightly and kissing her to keep her there. She gets distracted, drowning in Jane's kisses again, and it's only when Jane shifts her hips like she can't help it, pressing Max into the mattress and dragging the seam of her trousers across the soaked material between her legs, that the redhead remembers her plan and clutches the back of Jane's t-shirt, gasping into her mouth. “This off,” she mumbles, letting Jane kiss her as she tries to remember how to construct full sentences to avoid any confusion that would lead Jane to move even a millimetre away from her again. “Not you.”

Jane smiles against her lips. “Oh.” She kisses Max, long and wet as she slides their bodies together deliciously, and then nips her bottom lip, which is distracting enough that she's able to sit back on her heels, pulling Max's clinging legs half into the air as the shorter girl keeps them wrapped around her waist, and reaches for the hem of her shirt.

Max opens her mouth to protest the space between them, but her jaw goes slack as Jane pulls the t-shirt over her head and flings it aside. She's not wearing a bra, and Max's heated gaze travels over the new, pale skin, trying to drink in the sharp cliff of her collarbone, the gentle slope of her breasts, the flat expanse of her heaving abdomen, the dizzying curve of her hips, all at once. She swallows with her suddenly-dry throat, all of the moisture in her body temporarily relocated at the vision in front of her, and she has a half-thought about poetry and inspirations before Jane dips back down and kisses her headily again and she stops thinking at all.

Jane digs her long keyboardist fingers into the flesh at Max's hip and slides her palm slowly over the curve towards the shorter girl's backside, kisses more urgent now as she presses Max into the mattress with her body. Their breasts press together, soft flesh moulding to the shape of the other as their bodies slide against one another, and Max moans, rolling her body up into Jane's mindlessly at the sensation. She rubs her chest against Jane's shamelessly, thighs shaking so hard she can barely keep them locked around Jane as the feeling of the other girl's bare skin against hers sends sparks so hot they're almost painful across every inch of her skin. She's so caught up in the feeling of their soft, sweat-slicked skin sliding together she doesn't notice Jane has stopped kissing her until gentle teeth catch and hold the thin skin at the base of her neck at the same time strong fingers cup the curve of one of her breasts between their bodies and sink into her flesh.

“Oh, god,” Max groans, or means to, but she's not sure the words form coherently on her trembling, bruised lips, because lightening is crackling through every vein in her quivering body and she's not sure she has control over any part of herself anymore. She sparks and shakes beneath Jane, all senses and stimulation, rolling her head back with a guttural moan to expose more of her neck to Jane when her lover's sharp teeth make their way across her skin in the same slow, possessive pattern her fingers on Max's breasts do.

Jane bites down hard on the curve where her neck meets her shoulder at the same time her fingers tug sharply on her hard nipple, and Max gasps her name, lashes fluttering against her blushing cheeks as her eyes roll back. “So responsive,” Jane murmurs, awe in her voice as she moves her lips over the patch of skin she had just bitten soothingly. “I love seeing how I make you feel.”

“Fuck,” Max moans. Her legs finally give out and fall heavily onto the blankets beside Jane's, trembling so hard the bed shakes as Max lurches up into the other girl weakly. “J – Jane...”

Jane hums and shifts slightly to straddle one of Max's quaking thighs, pulling at her neck with her teeth as she repositions her weight onto her knees and flattens their breasts together. Max isn't sure if the burst of stars behind her eyelids is from the sensation of Jane's hard nipples digging into the soft flesh of her breasts as she starts to rock against her, or from the force with which her eyes roll back into her head, but she doesn't feel the need to pick out where every individual sensation Jane is making her feel because they weave and twist into a spiderweb of pure electricity through her trembling body, and she can only tighten her arms around Jane's solid shoulder-blades and follow her rhythm. Their breasts bounce together with the roll of their bodies, and the tension in her belly, building towards this new, wild, unexplored peak in their dance she'd only caught glimpses of in the wicked rise and fall of Jane's music before tonight, curls tighter and tighter, fuelled by Jane's short breaths against her cheek and Jane's toned stomach sliding against hers and Jane's unique scent heavy in all of her senses and Jane -

With a gasp, Jane stops moving above her, hips quivering as if reluctant to follow the plan of the rest of her body before she buries her face in Max's neck and takes a deep, gulping breath. “No,” she grounds out, trailing her nose almost reverently over the slope of Max's throat as she shakes her head slowly. “Max. Christ. Distracting.”

“Jane,” Max whines, shameless, body still moving with the pounding, intoxicating music inside of her. “Please.” Her mind is too clouded to be entirely sure what she's begging for but she knows she's never going to get it without Jane, and she lifts her heavy, shaky limbs with a sudden terror she can't quite put words to and wraps them around Jane as best she can, every inch of her which lines up with Jane's lithe form lighting up with need as ravenous as fire.

Jane leans up to kiss her, wet and clumsy and so heavy Max's bruised lips ache just a little bit, and the punk girl frowns seriously against the side of her panting mouth. “I want you,” Jane says in a gravelly voice, and with her words the tension in her belly coils so suddenly her head spins. “I want to feel how wet I make you. Still good?”

It is a good thing that the sensitive apex of her thighs is no longer lined up with anything solid, because she feels as if every blindingly-bright, shivering nerve inside of her would break apart and scatter her across the bed if she'd had Jane moving over her while she'd heard her say that. She moans and arches up, trying to find words, any words, to make Jane do what she'd asked, because she knows her lover will never move without hearing that Max wanted her to. “Jane, please,” she says breathlessly; she tries to open her eyes to show the other girl the need burning through her like a forest fire, but she can't quite seem to figure out how to lift her eyelids and her lashes flutter uselessly. “You – Jane, I  _want_  you.”

Jane is kissing her before she finishes her sentence. She rolls her body upwards drunkenly, savouring the hot, needy kiss, and she's so distracted she doesn't notice Jane repositioning her legs until her knee digs into her sensitive breast. She gasps at the sensation, and Jane pants heavily against her lolling lips as her hand slides over the curve of the shorter girl's freckled thigh to draw soft circles around her heaving navel.

“Beautiful,” Jane whispers, and the hand on her stomach slides down to pull her underwear over her hips.

She can feel how soaked the cotton is as Jane slides it over her trembling thighs, and this only heightens her awareness of how badly she needs Jane to touch her. She squirms impatiently, drunk and blind and starving as she feels herself drip onto the blankets below her, and then she's squirming for a new reason when the material brushes her bent knees at her chest as Jane's warm, sticky palm slides to cup her breast again. Her head rolls back as Jane kisses her, languid and much too slow while Max is a desperate, writhing mess just from anticipation, but Jane sucks her bottom lip and squeezes her straining nipple before sliding her hand back over Max's knee to pull the underwear down to her ankles. Jane nuzzles their noses together and kisses her softly again, and Max is already moaning when one palm cups her between her legs.

Max's legs shake violently, and she stops kissing Jane to gasp at the sensation. Jane keeps her hand still, just holding her as she continues kissing Max's gaping mouth, and Max lets herself utterly collapse back onto the mattress, knees lolling to either side of her body as she lifts her hips on instinct and moans incoherently into Jane's mouth. Every nerve ending in her body seems to be rushing to gather over the small section of her body that Jane is touching, and she squirms and arches, every plead and gasp and encouragement she wants to give to Jane getting strangled in her throat as she struggles for breath. Jane slowly starts moving her palm, gentle brushes against her dripping folds barely hard enough to tease, and her searing lips press a sweet kiss against Max's hair when the redhead shudders and gasps, digging her blunt fingernails into Jane's shoulder-blade with the movement. Max rocks her hips enthusiastically, but Jane shifts against her side and presses her hip down with the hand not between her legs, kissing her deeply when she whines with protest.

“Just wait,” Jane murmurs against her lips seriously, and she can only groan and kiss Jane back, greedy and willing.

Jane distracts her with hot, dizzying kisses long enough that she doesn't register the increase in pressure between her legs until the heel of Jane's hand, slick from Max's own wetness, slides up and brushes her clit. She jumps, world tilting dangerously as her arching spine lights up like a string of Christmas lights, and Jane smiles into her neck, resuming her teasing stroking as Max shakes and sinks back onto the bed. She nips the freckled skin beneath her lips and trails her nose up over the shaking girl's cheek to find her lips, and Max locks her arms around the back of her lover's neck to keep her there as they kiss clumsily. Jane sucks her bottom lip and brushes her clit again, and Max giddily thinks she sees the web of electricity buzzing inside of her when her eyelids fall at the impossibly-good sensations pouring through her body. Her toes curl in the blankets, and she's just thinking dizzily that she doesn't think she can handle much more than this when Jane slides her arm down gently and two of her fingers slip through Max's dripping folds.

Max thinks the moan which escapes her mouth is Jane's name, because it's the only word her clouded brain can remember, but she's not sure it's distinct enough that her lover will recognize it. Suddenly she's very concerned that Jane hear her name from Max's lips, that Jane know everything she's making Max feel summed up into the one word which makes her heart pound just from the sound of it, and she works her lips uselessly, trying to remember how to shape them when all of her seems to be focused on the feeling of Jane's long, keyboardist fingers sliding gently through her wet folds. Just the thought that Jane is  _inside_  of her makes her body writhe, and she bucks her hips artlessly, trying to get as much of Jane as she can as her lover keeps up a teasing, steady rhythm. Jane presses her hips into the mattress with her free hand again, and Max groans from deep within her burning, heaving chest at the need building unbearably inside of her that makes her want to pull Jane closer, deeper, harder into her.

“Responsive,” Jane smiles against her flushed cheek. “Does that feel good, Max?”

Max's head rolls back, and she grinds down onto Jane's hand as best she can with the firm grip still on her hip. Jane snickers, and for some reason this makes her skin blaze, like Jane is touching all of her at once. She bucks fruitlessly and moans, revelling in the taste of Jane on her tongue as her breath rattles in her throat. “Yes, Jane, god yes,” she babbles, heels scrabbling on the blankets before her legs collapse uselessly onto the mattress. “Please.”

Jane leans over her, lips hovering over hers just far enough away that it's not a kiss. “You feel so good,” she says lowly, and then she twists her wrist and sinks her fingers hard into Max's wet folds.

Max wails, spine arching off the bed as her whole body tenses. Mercifully Jane doesn't relent, pumping her fingers steadily as she holds Max's twisting hips down on the bed and swallows her incoherent noises with a kiss, and Max gives into her rhythm, riding her hand and letting herself drown in the addictive, wild, glorious freedom Jane somehow seemed to weave into everything she was, from her seductive music to her soft voice to her overwhelming presence.

Jane's hand twists up to brush her clit with every stroke, and the coil twisting deliciously in her belly is searing hot, burning into her insides like a branding iron as the tension builds headily. When she arches up mindlessly the hard points of their nipples slide over each other, and Jane's breath catches against her lips, and she starts making uncontrollable little “Ah – ah – ah -” noises with every stroke, and Jane squeezes her hip with the hand controlling her movements so hard she's sure she'll bruise and at this thought she feels every sparking, blazing nerve inside of her light up at once and she's coming.

It feels like her orgasm blazes through her exhausted body for hours, but somehow, when Jane tries to take her hand away, it's still too soon.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *Finger guns* one day Jane will actually be allowed to take off all her clothes  
> elmax fandom is <3 y'all rock my socks by reading about getting Max's socks rocked


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sappy smut warning

Drunk on the overwhelming feelings coursing through her body, Max has to blink the blurriness out of her eyes a few times before the world swims back into focus when she lifts her heavy eyelids at Jane's chuckle. "Falling asleep?" Jane mumbles into her skin, grinning lips dragging over her cheek as she kisses lazily along her blush.

Max hums, squirming as the web of electricity sparks through her whole body at Jane's voice. "No," she says breathlessly, turning her head blindly towards her lover. She tries to lift her heavy arm to wrap around Jane's waist to keep her close, but she hasn't quite gotten control back over her limbs and it flops a bit uselessly between their bodies.

Jane snickers and turns her chin with two fingers to kiss her deeply. "It's okay. We can stop."

"What? No!" Stomach tensing with sudden panic, Max throws her weight into rolling over onto her side to face Jane. Their noses flatten together as she presses as close as she can with her shaking, heavy limbs, hopeful kisses peppering against smirking pink lips. "I'm awake. I want you. I'm just not used to... All this. It feels so good."

Jane's smile softens against Max's lips, and she raises one warm, solid hand to the redhead's cheek as she returns the eager, sloppy kisses. "Okay. I want you, too."

Max's breath catches, and she wriggles closer, the sound of Jane's voice as she admits she  _wants_  her making her stomach coil for a very different reason than it had a moment ago. Jane wraps an arm around the dip in her waist and digs her calloused fingertips into the curve of her ass, and the electricity lighting up her quivering body gives her the strength to fling her arm and leg over Jane's body, hooking around her back greedily. The momentum rolls their bodies, Jane falling onto her back in one graceful movement without breaking their kiss, Max following eagerly and flopping on top of her, arm still trapped beneath the keyboardist's back as her knees slide to squeeze slim hips on the mattress. Max's long, tangled hair hangs over both of their faces like a curtain, hiding them from the outside world as their bare torsos slide together and they kiss, and kiss, and kiss.

Jane's hands slide to dig into the soft flesh at her hips, massaging the skin gently as she drags their bodies impossibly closer together. The added pressure makes Max suddenly very aware of her bare flesh brushing against the material of Jane's trousers, but instead of throwing her out of the moment like it had done before, it sends molten heat crashing through her like lava, melting her from the inside and pooling low enough in her belly to make her thighs flex reflectively. She feels herself drip onto Jane's trousers, and her head spins, panting wildly into Jane's mouth when she rocks her hips instinctively and her lover's strong fingers grip her skin possessively to hold her still.

"Fuck," Jane says breathlessly, fingers pulsing on her hips for a moment like she can't help it. "Max."

"You're so gorgeous," Max moans, unable to separate their lips for even the moment it takes to speak as she rolls her body along Jane's drunkenly and tenses her thighs again. For being the living embodiment of her tough, seductive punk music Jane is surprisingly soft-spoken and almost polite in the language that she chooses, and hearing her lose her head enough to swear so gutturally because of Max herself makes Max's whole body move desperately before she has any idea what she's trying to do with it. Her movements drag her wet, sensitive folds across the fly on Jane's trousers and she shoves her hands between their bodies, fumbling with the buttons uselessly as she buries her face in Jane's neck. “You make me lose my fucking mind.”

“You have to move for these to come off,” Jane mumbles into her hair, hands slipping between their bodies to cover Max's patiently. Max groans, rocking forward to lift her stomach from their hands, but she gets distracted when their breasts glide together with the movement and raises her arms to frame Jane's face and kisses her greedily. Jane lifts her chin and deepens the heady kiss, and Max is so lost in her mouth she starts when strong fingers find her hips again and tug her back down to line up their bodies.

She's thoroughly reminded, however, when her quivering, sticky thighs slide along bare skin. Her breath catches in her throat so suddenly she chokes a little bit, but she can't find it in herself to be embarrassed as the inner curve of their thighs brush together and Jane weaves her fingers through the hair at her temple to kiss her softly. She's utterly, absolutely bare, shaking and dripping and weak in her desperate desire to be all of these for Jane and more, but the kiss Jane gives her is tender, the touch of her hands in her hair and over the curve of her hip to her backside gentle, and Max takes a dizzy, wordless moment to let herself feel the true, unequivocal  _rightness_  of this for the first time in her short, tumultuous life.

Jane sucks her bottom lip as she pauses, glowing. “Still good?”

Max snorts a laugh, blushing a bit when Jane starts at the puff into her face. “So good. The best.”

Jane smiles, trailing the fingers buried in her hair down the length of it. “Hmm. Better than your sex books?”

Max laughs, too loud and crackling with emotion as she moves to press her burning face into Jane's throat. “Oh my god. They weren't  _about_  sex. Excuse me for living vicariously through literary – Hnmmmg.” Jane's knee bends, nudging her legs apart and sliding the musician's thigh against the apex between them. “Oh,  _Jane_.”

“Vicariously?” Jane murmurs, but her voice catches a bit at the end and the fingers playing with the frizzing ends of her hair ball into a fist for a split-second.

“Uhhh.” The keyboardist often asks questions about the more complicated words Max uses, usually in her rants about literature, but somehow Max can't quite think of what the word she'd just used means, either. “Doesn't matter. This is better.”

Jane's fingers sink into the fleshiest part of her backside and rock her hips forward just slightly, and she smiles into messy red waves when Max whines and arches her back eagerly. “Better?”

As naked as the rest of her, Max's words pour from her abused lips into Jane's skin as easily as breathing. “So, unbelievably better. You're real.”

Jane's fingers pause, and then rise to run down her back reverently as she tilts her face towards Max's still buried in her neck. “Yes,” she breathes, and rolls her hips to move the thigh between Max's legs.

Max has read the phrase  _seeing stars_  many times in her lifetime of devouring books, but she's never fully understood the concept until she'd met Jane. “God,” she chokes, hips bucking instinctively as heat rolls through her body from the spot their bodies connect, and Jane's familiar hands, firm but tender, wrap around the top curve of her thighs to guide her. She's so wet she barely has any friction as she glides along the top curve of Jane's thigh, but the feeling of their bodies sliding together, the peaks and valleys of Jane's firm, warm body beneath hers rising to meet her again and again, the echo of her previous orgasms still pounding in her coiled belly like a heartbeat, creates a different, equally-heady heat, and she lets herself burn up in it, luxuriating in every minuscule, earth-shattering  detail of Jane being close and perfect and willing and  _real_  beneath her.

She shifts her knee forward to grind down onto Jane's tensed thigh, and her own slides across another pool of wetness. Electricity bursts across every inch of her flushing skin, and she makes a high-pitched, strangled noise in her throat that she might have been embarrassed about if she'd been able to wrap her overheated mind around anything in that moment other than she'd made Jane  _wet_. Now that she's felt the intoxicating, molten heat between her lover's legs she can't concentrate on anything else, and she sits up abruptly and stares dazedly down at their glistening, writhing thighs. She shifts her weight to the knee balances on the outside of the leg she's straddling and rocks experimentally, and the guttural groan which tears from Jane's chest makes her vision blur dangerously.

“Jane,” she moans. She rocks a few more times, balancing her hands on Jane's heaving stomach. She's not quite sure how she's still upright, so focused on the glistening brown curls sliding along her quivering thigh, but Jane's death grip on her hips may have something to do with it. “That feels so good. Amazing.”

“That?” Jane says breathlessly, and guides Max's hips over her tensed thigh.

Max's eyelashes flutter, distracted. “Christ. Yes. But you – I want to make you feel like that. Like you made me feel.” She blushes, even though she's had multiple orgasms in front of Jane and she should probably be past shyness at this point.

Jane takes a shuddering breath, whether because of or despite Max's utter inability to be as seductive as she is Max doesn't know, and rocks her hips against the student's thigh. “Max,” she gasps.

Encouraged, Max leans over her, letting her heavy hair tumble around their faces as she rolls her lower body into her lover's with her palms planted on either side of their hips. Jane squeezes her ass and starts a rhythm, and Max follows willingly, dazed at the impossible image of Jane rocking and arching and panting beneath her. She's suddenly very aware of every little sound they're making, the heavy breathing and rustling blankets and skin slapping and bed creaking suddenly deafening in her ringing ears, and her mind blanks to everything except this moment, staring down in wonder at Jane as they move together in perfect, breath-taking harmony.

Jane bucks her hips up and arches her back, lips parting. Heart pounding, Max leans over her, but her hands flex on Max's backside and her grip loosens, breath-taking lithe body rocking arrhythmically now. Max grinds into her, but they're both so slick with cum now she's not sure it's enough. “Jane, you're so beautiful,” she breathes. She tries to remember how her skilled lover had thrown her over the elusive edge earlier, but her mind seems as incapable of doing anything except drowning in Jane as when she had been the one writhing on her back. “Tell me what to do,” she whispers.

“Max,” Jane whispers back, breathing laboured. She rolls her head back, mouth working without forming any words, and her hips pump into Max as if she can't help herself. “More,” she gasps, and slides one hand away from Max's bucking hips to grip her wrist and lead it between the musician's own legs.

Max's jaw drops; if Jane's wetness against her thigh was intoxicating, feeling it drip between her fingers was the most gloriously addictive sensation she's ever had. She and Jane moan together, and Max feels her eyes glaze over as she watches Jane soak her palm as the punk girl rubs herself against her hand. Jane's thighs trap her hand between them, quivering almost as hard as Max's whole body as her hips begin to jerk erratically, and Max swallows hard, too weak to do anything except stare and move her palm with Jane's movements as she watches the wild, heady music she's been chasing since she heard the first chords of Jane's keyboard solo come to life in front of her.

“Let me see you,” Jane pants.

Drugged by the vision in front of her, Max feels like she's moving in slow motion, but she sits up, shaking her long hair over her shoulders without looking away from Jane's rocking hips for a second. She lets out a shuddering breath, chest rising and falling with her exhalation, and Jane moans throatily and raises her hips, thighs lolling apart drunkenly. “Max,” Jane groans, husky voice an octave lower than normal. “Fuck.”

Max gasps and rocks forward, the heel of her hand burrowing between soaked folds to grind into her clit, and she feels Jane's orgasm like it's her own.

Jane's whole body tenses, and she arches off the bed, head rolling back as she cries out. She pumps her hips a few more times helplessly, and Max watches, enraptured, as the pale skin of her graceful neck flushes, fading as it creeps down her collarbones towards her heaving chest. She's beautiful, sweaty and shaking and utterly devastated as she makes a low hum which might be the most off-key noise the musician has ever made, and even after writhing sinfully slowly in the blankets for long enough that her breathing has evened out and her blush has faded, she's still the first to recover enough to move between the two of them.

“Max,” she pants, and reaches for her lover, wide brown eyes glazed and deliciously dark.

Max is on top of her immediately, trying to kiss every inch of her face at once as she presses their shaking bodies together, and she finds she can't quite catch her breath as she tries to drink in with all of her senses at once that this moment, this feeling, this woman, are all  _real_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hopefully this is enough to get these two to leave me alone and let me write Constellations, plot is hard you guys  
> I'm going to try to answer messages but I'm in class and they seem to need me to actually do classwork so if I run out of time every single solitary comment on anything I've written makes my whole life thank you for reading<3


	7. Chapter 7

Early-morning light, pink and yellows pale and soft in contrast to the bold floruescents scattered across the room, seeps in through the wide window of Jane's bedroom.

Max watches the colors play across Jane's pale skin. Jane had finally fallen asleep after hours and hours of impossible, glorious kisses, trapping Max beneath one strong arm as she snores softly into her pillow and solving the unspoken question of whether Max was invited to stay the night, but Max has been unable to sleep, body buzzing with wild, unfamiliar energy so intoxicatingly she can barely keep herself from shaking the bed. Despite the electricity lighting up every inch of her skin and coiling her belly so tightly she can barely breathe, she hasn't moved all night; she'd propped herself up against the headboard of the small bed, careful to keep Jane's heavy arm slung across her belly, and she'd gazed, enraptured, at the slight rise and fall of her naked back from her slow breathing.

This, she thinks to herself, mind slow and loose from sleeplessness and a new warmth she doesn't quite have a name for yet, if this exists, if this is how she can be, then she doesn't understand how only harsh words have been the way she's heard of something like this, moments too soft for the real world even as she watches the familiar sun rise on Jane's pale back.

The inching of the sun across dizzyingly-beautiful skin does nudge her brain into remembering that despite her vision narrowing down to this moment, the world is still turning outside the warm comfort of Jane's bed. Jane doesn't have a clock in her room, but she's stumbled half-asleep to enough early-morning classes by now that she knows what they sky looks like when she's dangerously close to being late. "Jane," she whispers, although it comes out as more of a wistful sigh than she means it to. She curls her body over the sleeping woman's, her muscles too deliciously sore and loose to protest even as her heart clenches rebelliously. "Jane, I have to go."

Jane makes an incomprehensible noise so deep in her chest it vibrates against Max's thigh. "No," she mutters, still asleep, and the arm flung across Max's stomach tightens reflectively.

Max grins, heart fluttering like a dragonfly in her chest as she gathers all of her hard-earned scholarly discipline to keep herself from sinking willingly onto the bed. "Yes. I have class. Probably soon. Can I have my legs back now, please?"

Jane nuzzles her face slowly into her pillow, but otherwise doesn't move at all. She'd fallen asleep with her hair still gelled, and Max is inordinitely in love with the awkward, greasy spikes sticking up haphazardly from her carefully-groomed hairdo, although she admits she might have been the cause of some of them too. The thought makes her stomach swoop giddily, and she digs the heels of her hands into the mattress and begins reluctantly sliding her backside away from her sleeping lover before she loses all resolve to move. "Now I see why I get calls at three o'clock," she mutters, blushing cheeks aching from her besotted smile.

She gently eases off the bed and begins gathering her clothes, padding around the small room as quietly as she can even as she half-hopes Jane will wake up. Even though no one can see her she blushes furiously when she pulls her underwear up her legs and feels how ruined they are, and she pauses to consider her options before she grimaces with a little wiggle of her hips and reaches for her jeans, the idea of sitting on the New York subway with her dirty underwear in her pocket far more mortifying than the mild discomfort of wearing them. She's never exactly been in this situation before, and she'd been so caught up in worrying that she would mess this up so badly that it wouldn't happen at all that she hadn't considered what she would need to do if it  _did_  happen, so she's woefully unprepared for minor details like getting home without displaying the finer points of her night to innocent commuters on the train. Amazed that she would still blush at the mere idea of sleeping with Jane even after spending the whole night enthusiastically participating in it, she pulls her long, tangled hair out of the back of her flannel and turns back towards the bed, whole body slowing at the sight of the sleeping woman strewn carelessly across the messy blankets. She'd spent the whole night watching Jane sleep, and somehow the sight still fills her with the same radiant awe she feels when she finds real, soulful poetry that reads more as a feeling than strings of words.

Reckless, she tip-toes over to the edge of the bed. "Jane?" she says softly, leaning over the punk girl and brushing a reverent finger over the high edge of her cheek, but Jane snores and doesn't stir. Max's heart squeezes, but she finds she can't quite remember how to feel disappointment as she drinks in the beautiful woman below her, messy and sleep-warm and solidly, impossibly real beneath her fingertip. Max pauses, reverent, and then dips down to kiss the top of Jane's head, barely a brush of lips at her hairline. "Bye, Jane," she whispers, and then pulls away to stand.

A few of Jane's band-mates are asleep in the living room as she tries to sneak through, limbs hanging off the backs of chairs or sides of the table in ways that can't be comfortable. The bodyguard, Mick, opens one eye as Max shuffles past, and her lips quirk up into a knowing smirk as her eyelashes flutter downwards lazily again and she leans her head back on the window behind her chair. Max blushes and scowls automatically, even though Mick can't see her with her eyes closed, and she tosses her hair as she clicks the front door shut behind her a bit more emphatically than she had with Jane's bedroom door.

Mick's smirk stays in her mind's eye as she hurries down the sidewalk towards the subway stop, but no one glances at her twice and she's feverishly thanking any god that will listen that she's in New York and not Hawkins as she slips onto a train right as the doors are closing. She sinks onto a seat beside the door, noticing for the first time how sore her thigh muscles are, and despite her earlier paranoia, despite the crowds of sleepy commuters around her and the uncomfortable reminder of how obvious she looks from between her legs and the growing ache from missing Jane already in her belly, or perhaps because of it, she grins so widely an embarrassing noise escapes her mouth and she buries her face in her hands.

She keeps her face in her hands until she hears her stop called over the speaker system, giddy and glowing. Her grin drops when she finally sees the time on a clock hanging from a pillar at her station, however, and she swears so violently an elderly woman gives her a look of horror as she tears out of the underground station towards her dorm. Furiously cursing herself, she darts across the leaf-covered lawn and flings herself into her residence, taking the stairs three at a time and trying to plot how to shave precious seconds off of the morning routine she's never needed as much as she does right now while her mind is dazedly, stubbornly, still back in Jane's warm bed. Her fingers pause reluctantly on the buttons of her wrinkled flannel when she finally reaches her room, and although she rolls her eyes at herself she takes a long, greedy sniff of the material before she pulls it over her head and flings it into her laundry hamper defiantly.

As much as she'd thought herself ridiculous, sitting through her class in clean clothes with the previous night showered away is agony. She misses Jane so badly her body aches, and she feels as if she'd left behind her only proof that their night together was real and not yet another one of her feverish, desperate fantasies. Her leg jiggles as she stares around at the other students and doesn't bother even pretending to look like she's listening to the lecture, mind still slow with lack of sleep and that unnamed, intoxicating warmth she'd found in Jane's bed, and she wonders, half-coherently, how many of them had had the experience she had the night before, how anyone went from that soft, slow, heady moment to the real world like nothing had changed. Her mind is clouded and lethargic, her body is still buzzing with the rhythm of Jane's music, and she drops the pen she hasn't used in surprise when the rest of the class rises around her and the professor dismisses them.

She borrows notes from the talkative boy sitting in front of her whose name she can never remember and heads over to Will's dorm armed with two cups of take-away coffee. Her next class isn't for two hours, and she'd considered going back to her dorm and trying to nap, but she knows she'll never be able to lie still, and despite her foggy thoughts she finds she can't stand the thought of being alone. What she really wants is to march right off campus and back into Jane's arms, strong and protective even in sleep, but thankfully even in her sleep-deprived, needy state she knows she would be pushing too hard and ruin the very thing she'd be looking for, and although she doesn't quite know what she should want right now, there was no one better at perspective than her brother.

She bangs her foot against the room door in lieu of knocking and it creaks open at bit. Rolling her eyes, she marches in and plunks the coffees down on Will's bedside table, reaching up to pull back the boys's window curtains mercilessly and only grinning at their groans of protest.

“Up and at 'em,” she smirks, picking up her coffee and taking a long, calm sip as her brother tries and fails to hit her with his pillow without opening his eyes.

“Who the  _fuck_  dares – Oh. Hi, Max.” Will's roommate Greg clears his throat, and she rolls her eyes at Will when her brother shields his face from the sun with one hand and peers up at her grumpily.

“I'm the only girl who would dare to venture anywhere near your room, Greg,” Max says without turning around. “Don't you ever go to class?” she adds to Will, crossing her arms over her chest and trying to imitate Joyce's not-mad-but-disappointed frown.

“I don't have class until one today,” Will says, voice gravelly. “One of those better be for me.”

“Cream and sugar with just a splash of coffee for flavour,” she teases. “You have to sit up to earn it, though.”

“Where's mine?” Greg pipes up behind her.  
“At the coffee kiosk, fifty cents,” Max says without taking her eyes off her brother. “Why do you look like you're Rip Van Winkle waking up from his nap?”

“I take after my sister,” Will mutters, swinging his legs over the side of the bed. He takes his coffee in both hands and closes his eyes as he drinks, either ignoring or not seeing her one-fingered answer to his statement.

“I think you look good, Max,” Greg says.

“You think I'm hotter than an old man who's been asleep for twenty years, good to know,” Max says, pulling Will's blankets off his body as he tries to swat her away and drink his coffee at the same time. “Feeling is not mutual.”

Will gives her a disapproving look even as he tries to hide his grin behind his coffee cup. She snatches it away from him and holds it over her head, raising her eyebrows when he groans in protest and reaches for it half-heartedly. “Find some pants and you can have it back,” she says. “Come on, we're going for a walk. Move your butt.”

“Max,” he whines, drawing out the word as he grabs uselessly for the coffee cup. She hides it behind her back and takes a slow, merciless sip of her own coffee, and they glare at each other for a long moment before he sighs and pushes off the bed reluctantly. She snickers, raising her chin victoriously as he shuffles towards his wardrobe, which is how she doesn't notice him flinging his discarded pyjama pants towards her face until it's too late.

“You could be nicer to Greg, you know,” Will says quietly as they walk across the carpet of leaves on the lawn in front of his dorm, sipping their coffees and hunching their shoulders against the cold autumn wind. “He's cool.”

“I was nice to him, and he started flirting with me,” Max points out. “I'm just doing damage control.”

“If you really want to do damage control you could bring Jane around,” Will says with a grin, watching her out of the corner of his eye as he takes a sip of coffee.

Max blushes, and Will chuckles, the sound distorted through the Styrofoam cup. “That would bring a whole other kind of damage,” she mutters, and Will laughs outright, bumping her elbow with his.

She bumps him back, eyeing the bags under his tired eyes as he shuts them to take a deep swig of his drink. “Hey, seriously, what's up with you? I know you're not out partying on school nights now.”

“I could be,” Will protests half-heartedly. She raises her eyebrows at him, and he bumps her shoulder with his and grins at his feet. “I'm okay,” he says, quieter. “Most of my classes are theory, and they don't give us time to actually create something. I've been painting once everyone leaves the studio and staying way later than I mean to. Last night I was there until the janitors kicked me out to clean.”

Max grins, reaching up to muss his hair. “Of course you would have the nerdiest reason for not sleeping,” she teases, and even though he pushes her hand away she catches his smile before he takes a sip of his coffee. “It's weird that they don't give you time for art in your world-renown art program, though.”

“Do they give you time to write in yours?” Will asks.

“All I do is write,” Max sighs, tilting her head back to look at the half-barren maple trees they're passing under. “Essays and papers and articles on what other people were trying to say in their essays and papers and articles.”

“But the writing you actually want to do,” Will says. “Do they give you time for that?”

Max shrugs, thinking of wide brown eyes and addictive pink lips. “Even if they did, they wouldn't want to read it.”

Will smiles a bit and links their arms together. “I bet I can think of someone who would,” he teases, and she punches his shoulder with the arm not wrapped around his and pulls him down onto a bench beneath a maple tree, blushing furiously. “Speaking of, she's the only acceptable reason you could pull me out of bed before the sun was fully up, so you'd better have a story for me.”

“The sun has been up for hours, wastoid.” Max bites down a pathetic smile, heart beating wildly in her chest as she tries to find words for the real reason she'd dragged Will out of bed. “Um. But. Yeah. She just got back in town two nights ago, and I went to see her play last night.”

“Really?” Will says, a frown in his voice. “Did you try to call me when I was at the studio? I really like seeing them live.”

Max looks up to meet his eyes, and she watches the comprehension dawn in them slowly. “Oh,” he whispers, and his cheeks heat up almost as brightly as hers. “Oh, you – Shit, Max.”

“Yeah,” Max says shyly. She kicks her foot aimlessly, unable to stop her foolish smile even as she feels her blush through her whole aching body. “So – So I didn't want to ditch you, or whatever.”

“No, that -” Will shakes his head a bit and laughs, and Max lets herself relax infinitesimally. “I appreciate you not inviting me, then,” he says with a smile, and Max laughs and buries her burning face in his shoulder. “That's big, though,” he says quietly, and Max grins giddily into his shoulder. “No wonder you look like you ate a whole bag of coffee beans. Was it good big?”

“Yeah,” Max sighs dreamily. She can still feel the new, disorienting energy buzzing through her body even hours after she'd left Jane, and she shivers as she focuses on it again. “Really good big. So, awesomely good.”

“Ugh, you're not going to tell me details now, are you?” Will complains, trying to shrug her off his shoulder.

Max laughs, clinging harder to his arm. “You're the one who wanted a story,” she teases. Talking about her incredible night with Jane makes it feel more real, like it became less of an impossible dream and more of a tangible memory with every word she says aloud, as true an experience as the galloping of her heard and coiling of her stomach now. “You were the one talking about telling stories about what I want. So we get to their place from the club and Jane drags me out of the crowd immediately -”

“Max, Jesus,” Will groans, covering her mouth with the hand she's not attached to. Max bursts out laughing, the wild, excitable buzz just beneath her skin bursting out of her uncontrollably, and she's too weak to fight off his hand or do anything except lean into his side and cackle insanely into his shoulder. She lets her hair fall over her face, burrowing into his sweater as she giggles helplessly, and she feels his quiet laughter vibrate through his chest beneath her as he settles them against the back of the bench with their joined arms.

“Good for you, Max,” he whispers, and she grins so widely her teeth scrape against the material of his sweater. “You deserve to be this happy.”

Max smiles at that, squeezing his arm with hers before she pulls away to lean against the back of the bench. She's not sure she can categorize what she's feeling under happiness, or only under happiness, but she finds, for the first time in her life, that her mind slows and pulls away at the thought of trying to put sensation to words.

_You can just feel. How does that feel?_

She leans back on the bench, rolling her head backwards and staring up at the red leaves clinging to the maple tree shivering almost as much as she is, and she lets herself smile.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I missed you guys!!! We're getting into project and exam season so updates are still going to be slower but I promise Constellations isn't going to be another two weeks ashljsglby;fg I'm so tired


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for smut!!!

The soft, rhythmic knock at the door makes her drop everything in her hands like a startled rabbit. She blushes reflectively, even though no one can see her, and squats down to gather the pile of t-shirts now covering her feet with shaking hands. Her heart hammers against her ribcage hard enough to bruise, and she has to clutch awkwardly at falling shirts almost escaping her arms more times than she'll ever admit before she successfully stuffs them back into her open drawer, her eagerness and anxiety battling for control over her sweaty hands.

It's probably a good thing Jane is earlier than expected to pick her up from her dorm for the night, she muses once she's finally managed to stuff the unruly pile back into the drawer and turn towards the door on watery knees; she's had all week to overthink their first and only night together, her overactive brain picking through every word and movement and sound she'd made with a fine-toothed comb until the perfect, glowing memory had unraveled into loose tendrils of embarrassment over everything she had done in Jane's overwhelming presence, and clearly the last thing she needs is more time alone with her thoughts. She knows she's being paranoid - Jane had flirted with her and invited her to sleep over on the weekend, unprompted, when Max had finally given into her desperation to hear her lover's voice again and called her the day after they'd slept together, and although they haven't spoken since Max has no reason to think the other girl has suddenly changed her mind about whatever their arrangement has turned into. This, of course, is what the anxious fluttering in her stomach always comes back to; she has no idea who she is to Jane, a friend or girlfriend or pathetically easy target, and although Max knows she wants Jane far too much to say no to any of these options, not knowing what Jane thinks of her or expects from her is almost as bad as the secret, burning fear she'd had for their long, lonely months apart that Jane doesn't think of her at all.

She squares her shoulders and crosses the small bedroom in a few purposeful strides, pausing with her hand on the doornob to roll her eyes at herself before she pulls the door open. Jane is leaning against the doorjam with one shoulder, fist half-raised as if she's about to knock again, and she's so breath-takingly beautiful as she pauses to take Max in with a lazy grin pulling at her pink lips that Max's vision blurs for a dizzying moment when the air is stolen from her lungs all at once. The anxious fluttering in her stomach bursts into a thousand eager butterflies, and the door swings forward abruptly and bumps her backside when she steps closer to the other girl automatically.

"Hi," Max says breathlessly.

Jane's only answer is her dark eyes dropping to Max's lips. A shiver runs up Max's spine, and she swallows and stumbles backwards a few steps into her room so that she won't let Jane kiss her in front of her dorm-mates like she's dangerously close to doing. "Uh, come in for a sec, I'm almost ready," she says, and blushes hotly at the unintended huskiness of her voice. "I just got back from class, I'm still packing."

Jane follows her into the room, still quiet as she runs a thumb over her bottom lip and glances back at the hallway out of the corner of her eye. She's never been a particularly talkative person, even over the phone, but her silence makes the anxiety twist Max's stomach again despite the giddy butterflies and her mouth runs off without her. "I guess I could have packed before class, but planning isn't exactly my strong suit before coffee. Plus I had all my books in my backpack and I -”  
The door clicks shut behind them, and Jane wraps her arms around Max's waist to pull her close and kisses her hard. Max melts, words dying on her lips as they open eagerly into the kiss, and the anxiety in her stomach fades away with the rest of the world as she sinks into the closeness she's been craving for almost a week. She grips the lapels of Jane's leather jacket and tries to pull he closer as their tongues slide together, even though their bodies are already pressed together so intimately she can feel Jane's studded belt digging into her skin through her t-shirt, and her knees almost give out beneath her when she feels Jane's slow grin form against her own mouth.

Jane starts walking her backwards, and the last brain cell she has not melting out of her ears at Jane's nearness sparks with a warning. “Wait, wait,” she gasps, and Jane pauses mid-step, although neither of them move their lips and her head spins dangerously as they gasp into each other's mouths. She swallows, trying to remember why she would ever ask Jane to stop kissing her, and her lover doesn't exactly help when she lifts one warm hand to cradle her face and leans their foreheads together. “My roommate,” Max pants, eyelashes fluttering as she tilts her cheek into Jane's palm. “Sh - She could come home any time.”

Jane considers for a beat, then leans backwards, keeping the arm wrapped possessively around Max's waist as she reaches behind herself with the other. She arches an eyebrow and clicks the door locked, and before Max can recover from the expression enough to point out that this was pointless, as by virtue of living there her roommate would have a key, Jane lunges forward and kisses her deeply, tilting her chin upwards with a solid hand back on Max's cheek. Max moans, very much by mistake since she's fairly certain she's supposed to be protesting something, and Jane's tight hold on her as she resumes leading her backwards towards the bed is the only thing holding her quivering, sparking body upright as she loses herself in the dizzying barrage of kisses again.

The back of her knees hit the edge of her mattress, and she collapses onto it abruptly. Jane leans over her, the hand cupping her face carding through the thick waves at her temple as she sucks her bottom lip possessively, but she doesn't follow Max onto the bed, only leaning one knee onto the mattress beside Max's thigh as she hovers over her body teasingly close. Max curls her fists in the soft leather covering her stomach and tries to pull her downwards, but Jane only grins against her lips and nips her, tongue sliding into her mouth seamlessly when she gasps. She takes control of their kiss, and Max gives in easily, chasing her lips as her own greedy hands slide up her belly and over her chest to the jacket's zipper.

Jane lets her undo her leather jacket, so distracted by their kissing that it takes several minutes and more than several tugs to open completely, but then she draws away from Max's lips with a sigh to shrug the jacket off her shoulders and it is Max who is undone as she watches her from beneath half-lowered lashes. Jane holds her eyes as she slides the jacket off and lets it fall to the floor carelessly, and although she's wearing a loose t-shirt beneath it the frantic butterflies in Max's stomach swoop as dizzyingly as if she's watching a striptease and she's panting heavily by the time Jane leans back down to kiss her. She wraps her arms shamelessly around Jane's neck, tugging earnestly now to pull Jane down onto the bed with her, and a little whine escapes her lips when Jane pulls away from them to blaze a trail across her jawline down to her neck.

Jane hums into her skin, and her thighs quiver and loll apart at the sound of her throaty voice finally in her ears again. "Been thinking about the way you respond for me all week," she mumbles, brushing the tip of her nose along the curve of Max's neck just light enough to tease, and Max makes an embarrassing noise in her throat like she's drowning and arches up into her helplessly. "Still better than I remember." She slides their breasts together as she leans upwards to kiss Max with bruising force, and Max more falls onto the mattress than lies back when Jane presses her backwards, but her lover finally follows her down so she can't find it in her clouded mind to be embarrassed. Jane parts her legs with one knee between them and pulls her wet bottom lip with both of her own, letting it bounce back after a long, heady moment when she hovers above Max just out of reach of her needy mouth. "I want to try something," she breathes.

Max is already so lost in her intoxicating kisses and even more intoxicating body, strong and solid above her, that she wants to agree to anything Jane asks right now, but when she opens her mouth to tell Jane this all that escapes is a high-pitched, helpless whine. She rolls her body against Jane's, hoping to convey how willing she is to go along with any idea Jane might have about her with her body since her extensive vocabulary seems to evaporate the moment Jane touches her, but Jane presses her hopeful hips back into the mattress with her own and kisses her patiently, and Max knows she won't move until she hears Max's permission.

Max strains her neck upwards to kiss her back, allowing herself to drown in the encompassing heat of Jane's lips as she tries to find the words to express how much she wants her to keep going. "Jane," she sighs, and her whole body rocks dreamily just at the name. Jane rolls her hips sinfully slowly in retaliation, and her breath catches in her throat as her eyes roll back into her head a bit. "Please," she manages.

Jane kisses her, greedy and messy as she gives in all at once and pins Max to the mattress with her body weight. Lapping her tongue against Max's in a way which makes the white-hot coil in her belly tighten so deliciously her muscles clench and raise her backside off the bed, Jane shifts so that both knees are balanced between Max's thighs and runs one hand down the outside curve of her body to find the fleshiest part of her hip and squeeze. She sweeps her tongue over Max's possessively when the redhead moans gutterally and then pulls back, pressing wet, open-mouthed kisses down the underside of Max's chin to her neck. Their bodies slide together as she slowly moves down Max's throat, leaving a blazing trail in her wake as she follows the curves and lines with her lips and the hint of her teeth, and Max doesn't realize she's wrapped her legs around her lover's waist until her backside is half-lifted off the bed with Jane's shuffling. Jane slides the hand at her hip up over her thigh to gently pry her knees apart, and the snicker which she puffs into her Max's neck when she tightens her thighs around the punk girl stubbornly sends electricity crackling across her sensitive skin.

"I want to touch you," Jane whispers, and the eager butterflies in her stomach migrate to flutter between her legs. "This can't come off unless you let me go." She slides her hand back over Max's thigh to slip beneath the hem of her t-shirt demonstratively.  
Max takes a deep, shuddering breath and arches up into her hand, clouded mind battling between wanting Jane's hands on her and never wanting to let her go now that she's finally entangled with her again. Her decision is made for her when Jane strokes up her belly reverently to cup one of her breasts over her bra, and her legs shake so hard Jane shifts her hips and moves up her body easily. Jane captures her gasp with a deep, searing kiss, and she melts back onto the bed gratefully, every part of her that touches Jane singing with electricity.

Jane pulls away to let her breathe, pressing sloppy, artless kisses over her blushing cheek. Her lips travel lower as her hand slides higher, the palm teasing her breast trailing over the curve to drag the material of her t-shirt up over her heaving ribs. She's panting when her mouth and hand meet at the valley between Max's breasts, kissing her over the shirt before she balances her weight onto her knees and pushes the material over the top curve of Max's chest to reveal her flimsy cotton bra. Her lips immediately close around one nipple straining desperately against the thin cup, and Max cries out, body jerking like she's felt an electric shock as Jane's teeth close around the hard point before she mouths across the soft bottom curve greedily. Max shakes beneath her as she travels over to her other breast, hands flying off the bed to clutch at the back of her lover's shirt desperately, and the coil tightens dangerously hot in the pit of her belly when Jane sucks her straining nipple hard enough to hollow her cheeks and presses her palm between Max's legs at the same time. Max is wearing jeans, so she really only feels a slight pressure as Jane massages the seam at the apex of her thighs with the heel of her hand, but just the idea of Jane's hand between her legs, the slight tease of the weight of her and the anticipation building so low she can't really qualify it as her stomach any more, makes her whole body light up all at once, heat blazing across every inch of her buzzing skin to pool against Jane's hand. Her head rolls back against the mattress and she arches up, blind even as her lashes flutter half-open when her eyes roll back into her head, and she rocks her hips into the rhythm of Jane's gentle massage without hesitation.

Jane sucks hard enough on the bare top curve of her breast to leave a mark and slides her body downwards, withdrawing both the pressure of her mouth and hand as she shifts towards the edge of the bed. Max gasps, half-forming her name, and clutches the neck of her t-shirt with both hands, yanking it up enough to strangle in her desperation. Jane smiles against the gap between her ribs, reaching up to run one strong musician's palm up the back of Max's thigh when it shakily tries to wrap around her again to keep her in place, and Max rolls her body up into her blindly, searching for any pressure between her legs again as her whole body coils so tightly she can't seem to catch her breath.

"Max," Jane mumbles into her skin, massaging the back of her thigh teasingly close to the bottom curve of her ass.

"Jane, please," Max whispers, voice high-pitched and breathless as she tries to search through the heavy fog in her mind for what she'd done to make Jane stop. "Please."

"I know," Jane says softly, and kisses the sharp edge of her rib sweetly like she hadn't just had a hand between her legs. "Just wait." She buries her face in Max's stomach and resumes pressing light, teasing kisses down the goosebump-riddled flesh, gently easing her body down the insides of her quivering thighs until she slips off of the edge of the bed seamlessly, pressing her lips to the top button on the fly of Max's jeans as she leans over the lower half of her prone body. Her hands slide down Max's legs to take the place of her lips, and Max's whole body is shaking too hard to help her when she unbuttons her jeans and gently eases them down her thighs.

Panting, Max tries to prop herself up onto her elbows to look down at her lover, but her muscles seem to have melted into the lava flowing through her body to pool between her quivering legs. She blows a frizzing lock of her own hair out of her face and tilts her head down to see the top Jane's gelled hair between her spread knees, tilted downwards as she slides Max's jeans and undoubtedly-ruined underwear over her ankles. Jane looks up to meet her hazy eyes as soon as she rids her of her clothes, and the vision of those dark, captivating eyes, serious as she watches Max from beneath her thick lashes, between her legs makes searing heat crash through the core of her so desperately she feels herself drip onto the sheets.

"Still good?" Jane says softly, holding her gaze steadily as she leans one flushed cheek against the inside of Max's knee.

Max swallows around her suddenly-parched throat, nodding so emphatically her mussed hair flops onto her burning nose and cheeks. "Yeah," she croaks, just in case Jane needs to hear her assent before she would continue again. "More than good."  
Jane smiles at her warmly, her little pink half-smile that always manages to make Max's knees shake even when she's not between them, and leans forward to slide her arms over the tops of Max's thighs. She ducks her head and tilts it slightly, and Max's body jerks at the feeling of warm lips barely brushing the dripping opening between her legs. Her head spins, and she shifts mindlessly over the blankets, buzzing with the new, wicked electricity crackling through her entire, weak body. Her hips lift automatically, seeking the feeling again, and Jane's patient but firm hand glides across her skin to press down on her navel as those devastating lips press against her sensitive flesh again, lining up with her opening like a kiss.

"Fuck," Max gasps. "Jane." She arches up, blinded by the lights exploding behind her eyelids from the simple touch, and Jane has to wrap both arms around her thighs to keep her on the bed this time. Jane digs her strong pianist fingers into the sensitive insides of her thighs beside her head, controlling even as Max feels that irresistible half-smile form against her leg, and she presses a sweet kiss to one side before she slides her face along the sensitive skin to nuzzle the wet curls between them. She presses her lips against the outer folds a few more times, each brush of her lips lasting longer and longer until she's dragging her lips devastatingly hot and slow along the sensitive skin, and Max is just starting to wonder if anyone has ever suffocated from trying not to moan too loudly when the flat expanse of Jane's tongue brushes against her.

"Oh!" Max grabs blindly at the blankets beside her head, hips jumping as much as they can in Jane's tight grip. "Oh my -" She makes an incoherent, gravelly noise in her throat and rocks off the bed, spine curving as her torso twists and arches in the way her captive hips cannot. Jane drags her tongue just inside her opening and she moans helplessly, thighs clenching against her lover's cheeks as molten heat crashes through her body like a tidal wave. "Oh, _fuck_ , ah, J - Jane -"

Jane turns her head to shush her, little upturned nose digging into the jumping muscles of her inner thigh. "Your whole building will hear you," she mumbles, even though the grin she rubs against Max's skin is sinfully smug. She brushes a kiss against the leg she's nuzzling and then turns back to where Max wants her most, and Max's spine curves off the bed mindlessly again when she feels her own wetness smeared across her skin from her lover's lips.

Jane teases her with gloriously skilled lips and tongue, and she writhes and bucks helplessly on the bed with the coiling in her belly. She twists so wildly her long hair gets tangled beneath her shoulders as she moves, but the white-hot flash of pain at the pull only winds the intoxicating pressure in her core tighter. The weight of Jane's strong, possessive arms pinning her to the bed, the heat of her face between her legs, the delicious torture of her mouth and tongue so enthusiastic against her most sensitive flesh, all comes together to wash over her so overwhelmingly the pleasure borders on pain, and she can't help the wordless, needy cries which escape her mouth despite Jane's earlier warning. She lets her body move, wild and uncoordinated, with the drugging music their bodies are making together, until the flutters of Jane's tongue sends an answering fluttering through her core, and she grubs blindly across the bed for her pillow with her last available brain cell before her orgasm bursts from inside of her across every inch of her overheated skin. Blinded by the spiderweb of pure electricity blazing through her body that only Jane can ignite, she moans and wails shamelessly into the pillow she miraculously manages to press against her mouth as Jane's lips slow between her legs until she's soothing the overstimulated flesh with gentle kisses. Max vaguely feels her pull away to wipe her face on the inside of her thigh, but she's so lost in the crashing waves of her orgasm she doesn't process anything outside of the gloriously devastating heat she's drowning in until Jane tugs the pillow away from her face and she's drowning in those dark, serious eyes instead.

"So fucking beautiful," Jane says hoarsely, and she dips down to kiss Max hard.

Max is absolutely too drunk and gratefully devastated to move, but she groans and accepts the kiss as best she can as she revels in the feeling of Jane's body over hers. Even as the echoes of her orgasm still ripple through her body, every inch of her skin that brushes her lover's lights up so greedily she wonders if it will ever be possible to satisfy the hollow, hungry black hole of need she has for Jane's touch. Although she knows the keyboardist had wiped her mouth before kissing her, she tastes a familiar stickiness on Jane's tongue when it delves into her wanting mouth possessively, and her whole body shudders and bucks upwards with a surge of heat as she tastes the evidence of how Jane makes her feel from her lover's mouth.

Jane's fingers weave through hers beside them on the rumpled blanket, stroking their tongues together purposefully. "I know, you taste so good," she whispers hoarsely, and kisses her deeply as she writhes with fresh need beneath her.

Max drowns in her kisses, gratefully lost to everything except her mouth and her weight and her scent and her, and her whine of protest when Jane finally pulls back is strangled in her throat as her lungs beg for air. Jane snickers and pulls her up to a sitting position, but she burrows into her lover's body, muscles still too weak to hold her upright even if she'd been able to bear to be even an inch away from the other woman. "Jane," she sighs, shameless as she revels in the dangerously-freeing intoxication she always finds in Jane's touch.

"Hi," Jane says softly, and Max's skin lights up with the now-familiar spiderweb of electricity when she feels that half-smile press against her temple. "We have to go."

"What?" Panic gripping her clouded mind as tightly as she grips the bottom of her lover's t-shirt, she flows into Jane's lap as hastily as her weak legs will allow to keep her as close as possible. "Don't go."

Jane smiles, lifting one hand to cup her flushed cheek. "Not me. Us. You were packing to stay the night with me. So we could do this without worrying about your roommate coming home."

Max blushes so hot she feels sweat bead across her tingling skin, and she gathers every ounce of strength she has left in her vibrating, hollow body to slide herself off of Jane's lap. She rises slowly on shaky legs, feeling strangely exposed as she's reminded of her bared lower body when she stands in front of her lover and her shirt flutters back down over her chest. "Right, packing, packing," she mutters, looking anywhere except for Jane, but those strong, warm hands slide over the curve of her hip and sticky expanse of her inner knee and, predictably, smoky heat flows from where her appreciative touch brushes through her whole body. She pulls her tangled waves over the shoulder facing Jane to hide her expression and toes her way into her discarded underwear, wrinkling her nose when the ruined material brushes against the arch of her foot. "Extra underwear," she mumbles under her breath, but Jane still hears her and snickers wickedly.

She slips away from Jane's hands reluctantly and pads over to her wardrobe. Although she purposefully avoids looking at the woman lounging across her bed so distractingly she feels every buzzing nerve ending in her body straining to return to her even though she's only a few paces away, she still feels that steady gaze burning into her naked skin, and despite her full-body blush she finds herself swinging her hips as she walks and bending over her open drawer from the waist a bit more than is strictly necessary. Jane's attention is almost as addictive as her touch, and she wonders somewhere in her still-clouded brain whether there's a way she can turn her redressing into some sort of reverse striptease while she's pulling her new underwear up her legs before she gets ahold of herself and slams her drawer closed so hastily the dresser shakes a bit. She swings her packed bag over one shoulder and marches back over to pick up her discarded jeans, the bravado she manages belied by the pathetically-eager butterflies taking flight in her stomach again as she draws closer to Jane.

Jane, for her part, only smiles softly at her as she yanks her trousers up her legs as unceremoniously as possible. The musician slides off the bed, grabbing her jacket from the floor as she rises to her feet to stand so close to Max the heat of her burns through their clothes, and all of Max's discipline evaporates into a breathy sigh when she leans in to kiss her gently.

Jane reaches out to weave their fingers together. “Don't know why you need to pack clothes at all,” she murmurs against Max's lips.

Max laughs shakily, trying to negate her foolish grin with an eyeroll as she steps backwards and begins leading the way to the door with their joined hands. “People on the subway might be a little bit less enthused than you about me walking around with no clothes.”

“It's New York,” Jane points out, and interrupts Max's snort with a deep kiss.

Max wraps her arms around Jane's neck and sinks into the kiss without a thought. Jane plants both strong hands on her hips and gently ushers her backwards towards the door, capturing her bruised lips again and again with her own, and Max is dizzily hanging her body weight off of her shoulders when the rustling of a key in a lock blares through the fog in her mind like a bullhorn. She tenses, but Jane backs her into the door and slams it shut with one careless arm against the wood beside their heads without breaking their kiss, and she's so drunk and weightless under Jane's power that she can only giggle against her lips.

“Maxine?” her roommate Mary's voice floats through the door, muffled by the wood and the fog in her brain. “Are you in there? Is the door stuck?”

“Jane,” Max mumbles against her lover's insistent lips, grinning drunkenly as Jane keeps up her relentless barrage of kisses as if the door isn't rattling violently behind them.

Jane sighs and draws away, hovering close enough that Max has to step into her lithe body when she pushes off the door on watery knees. Max catches sight of her sucking her abused bottom lip into her own mouth as she reaches for the door handle, and the residual, glittering heat in the base of her belly flares at the sight and she can't resist sweeping her own tongue over her lip in search of their mingled taste.

The door rumbles and swings forward as soon as they step away, and Jane catches her with one protective arm when she stumbles forward from the force of it. "Hello? If you're pranking us I won't hesitate to get the residence monitor, this isn't funny -"

"Calm down, Mary, it's just me," Max says, stepping out of Jane's embrace reluctantly to peer around the door at her roommate with raised eyebrows. "We're not in preschool, no one's going to prank us."

"I am calm, Maxine," Mary frowns at her piously from the doorway. She had categorically refused to call Max "A boy's name" from the moment Max had asked her to, and Max had categorically stopped being friendly to her ever since. "Someone could have been breaking in."

"I doubt anybody's going to go through the trouble of breaking in to steal your secret stash of Harlequin romance novels," Max says, and her heart gallops pathetically at Jane's snicker behind her.

"Well you never know, with the degenerates running -" Mary freezes mid-sentence when Jane walks around the door, eyes widening as she takes in her gelled hair and smoky, sweat-smudged make-up. Jane raises an eyebrow as she shoulders her way through the doorway, stunningly-beautiful features unreadable as she stares the other girl down in silence, and Mary actually takes a step backwards as she passes.

"Degenerates?" she murmurs.

Max can't help it; she laughs. Mary, mouth gaping wordlessly, turns to look at her in disbelief, and she slips through the door after Jane, resisting the urge to throw herself into the punk girl's embrace just to see Mary's reaction. Her roommate has been very vocal about her disapproval of Max's clothes and music preferences and unladylike language and almost everything about her since they day they had moved in together, and it felt better than it probably should to see her so cowed by Jane's very presence, overwhelming as she can admit that it is. "I'm not going to be back tonight, don't wait up," she says, and grins when Mary's eyes snap suspiciously to Jane again. "Have a good weekend, try not to call the cops on people in the hallways having fun." She turns to begin marching down the hallway away from Mary, letting her long hair swing over her back to hide her blush even as she tries to bite down her giddy smile.

Her lips still taste like Jane, and she can't help but glance at her lover as she falls into step beside her. Jane is already looking at her, and when their eyes meet they both burst into muffled, almost nervous giggles. Max lets herself grin under Jane's warm gaze and speeds up her steps to match the hammering of her heart as they turn a corner towards the stairs, and when Jane's warm keyboardist fingers weave through hers as they break into a run she lets the giddiness bubble out of her in a full, shameless laugh.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy pride month!!! I'm finally on summer vacation so I should actually start updating regularly again, although this took me a lot longer than I was expecting so I hope I haven't lost my mojo ashglshsjd;lfh


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for smut!!!

On the rare occasion that Max has touched herself over the years, she's never really had a fantasy in mind.

There has always been an underlying current of shame when she thinks about sex; until very recently, she'd been convinced that what she wanted made her as bad as the criminals and degenerates her step-father spat at on the evening news, which made it particularly difficult to indulge in if she had even managed to get herself worked up. She'd learned early on that trying to train herself to focus on boys simply didn't do anything, and even the thought was usually enough to make her stomach drop and her skin cool. Finding Billy's old magazines had thrown her into a flurry of excitement she'd never experienced before, but even this had faded after a few, greedy nights when the high of the discovery had worn off and she'd only been able to focus on the blank eyes and reluctant expressions of the women entangled in ways that could only be for the viewer and not for the burning hope which was always lurking in the base of her stomach no matter how many times she tried to stamp it down. If anything, the magazines had reinforced what she'd always suspected; other women didn't want this, and the fact that she did was awkward at best and predatory at worst. Somewhere over the course of her adolescence she'd accepted this unspoken rule, and the result had come to her squeezing her eyes shut tight and trying not to think about any person she knew in particular, let alone herself with someone.

So when Jane tells her, eyes glazed as she takes her time drinking in Max's bruised lips and voice so husky Max can feel it vibrate through her stomach like the bass in her songs, that she'd been thinking about having Max back in her bed since she'd left it, no shame-filled, disjointed fantasy Max has ever had comes close to how she feels in this moment.

“What did you think about?” she breathes, too quickly and far too eager. Jane has ridded her of her flannel and jeans before they'd even reached the bed, and she's straddling Jane's lap in just a thin t-shirt, sweaty fingers clutching the lapels of her lover's leather jacket as she resists the urge to grind down in search of relief from the molten heat between her legs at the mere suggestion that Jane wants her.

Jane grins lazily, tilting her head to run her gaze over Max's flushed face from beneath her thick eyelashes. Usually smugness makes Max's hackles rise, the presumptuousness of someone thinking they have her all figured out giving her the seemingly insurmountable urge to prove that they don't, but there's never any malice behind Jane's grin; despite being a tough, rule-eschewing street punk, every action Jane does has a kind of purity behind it, like a bad intention has never occurred to her, and her smug amusement at Max's desperation is so genuine that Max can't find it in herself to be defensive. Besides, her smugness is earned, if the wetness dripping down her quivering thighs and sticking the ruined cloth of her underwear to her most sensitive flesh is anything to judge by.

Her breath shudders embarrasingly when Jane leans into her, brushing their noses together as her strong musician's fingers wrap around Max's hips and haul her forward. “This,” she whispers, and then she kisses Max deeply.

Every inch of Max's skin lights up. She presses forward shamelessly, arms lifting to wrap around Jane's neck as she kisses back with abandon. Their lips slide together, wet and messy and almost as greedy as Max feels when every hill and plain of their upper bodies slides together with their movements, and her own groan sounds muffled by the pounding of her own desperate heart in her ears. Jane's hands slide up the back of her thighs over the curve of her ass and squeeze, and Max realizes she'd been rolling her hips mindlessly against Jane only when the firm grip on her backside stops her.

“Max,” Jane murmurs against her lips, blunt fingernails slipping beneath the hem of her t-shirt to sink into her skin, and her throaty little laugh is Max's undoing.

“Show me,” Max blurts out. She blushes when Jane pulls her head back just enough for her to the quizzical look in those brown eyes, but she holds the gaze resolutely. “Show me what you wanted me to do,” she says, in as clear a voice as she can manage with her heart in her throat.

Jane's eyebrows rise, but her cheeks flush pinker than her slightly-parted lips and her eyes are glazed and unfocused as they drop hers to flit over Max's face. She's so beautiful, sweat beading on the narrow bridge of her little upturned nose and thick lashes casting long shadows over sharp cheekbones and lipstick smudged from Max's own mouth, and Max forgets that she's waiting for an answer and lunges back in to kiss her, lost to everything except the siren song Jane creates with her body like she does her keyboard.

Jane kisses her back without missing a beat, one hand sliding up the curve of her spine to crush their bodies together as she sucks Max's lower lip between both of her own. Her tongue slides between Max's lips while they're still parted when she relaxes her lips, and Max's world spins dizzily as their tongues slide together as hot and sinfully slowly as their hips do under Jane's lead with the hand still on Max's backside. So lost in the endless, luxurious kisses, she almost forgets whose dream this is supposed to be until Jane slides her hand around Max's ribs to cradle her face and breaks the kiss gently, fingers tangling at the heavy red hair behind her ear while Max pants shallowly. “You like the idea?” she whispers, a smile in her voice, although she sounds more baffled than smug this time.

Eyes still closed, Max turns her face towards her like she's basking in the sun and nods, electricity crackling hot over her skin as she rolls her body against Jane's and she feels the outlines of the jacket lapels drag against her sensitive breasts. “Tell me what to do,” she says softly.

Jane drops the hand on her cheek to wrap a strong arm around her waist, pulling her in for a searing, too-brief kiss. “This off,” she whispers, and tugs at the hem of Max's t-shirt.

Max tightens her grip on Jane's hips with her knees and leans back just enough to pull the shirt carelessly over her head. She shakes out her mussed hair and winds her arms around Jane's neck again as soon as she's free of the fabric, pressing a few greedy, wet kisses against Jane's mouth before she can catch up. She can feel every detail of Jane's jacket against her sensitive skin, now, the sweat on her stomach sticking to the worn leather as she slides her chest along Jane's just because she can, and she makes a gurgling, whining sound she'll probably be embarrassed about later when her hard nipples drag against the soft leather as she tries to burrow closer.

“Max,” Jane mumbles, as if she's about to ask a question, but she kisses Max hard and they both forget about her sentence.

“Jane,” Max pleads when the other woman pulls back to catch her breath, or she tries to say, but it only comes out as a high-pitched whine as her words get lost in the fog covering her mind and her swollen lips struggle to form words. Jane kisses her again, rough and artless, and Max dizzily basks in the feeling of weightlessness which comes with Jane's kisses until her bare back hits the mattress and she realizes she had just been weightless in Jane's strong arms as her lover lowered her down onto the bed.

Jane leans down to kiss her. Max arches up mindlessly as Jane's body weight settles on top of her, greedy, but she jolts back to herself all at once when Jane balances on one elbow beside her head and her hair pulls so painfully when she lurches upright that she sees stars. She hisses in pain and flops back down onto the bed, and Jane sits up immediately, kneeling between her splayed legs as she runs her fingers apologetically through the tangled waves.

“Sorry,” Jane whispers.

“No,” Max blurts out, reaching up for her blindly as she struggles to remember how to open her heavy eyelids. Her fingers find Jane's beltloops and hook around them, light bursting behind her eyelids for a very different reason when she tugs and the inseam on Jane's trousers slides along the thin fabric of her underwear sinfully. “Come back.”

She hears Jane's snicker draw closer as the other girl swoops down to kiss her again. She lifts her chin up to deepen the kiss, lips already open and eager before Jane's even touch them, and a hum of pleasure rumbles from her chest into Jane's mouth over hers when she feels gentle fingers run down the length of her hair. The touch is soothing, and she tilts her head with the light pull when Jane breaks away from her lips to look up at her hands. Max blinks open bleary eyes to see Jane's face hovering just over hers, dark eyes serious as she watches her hands carefully arrange Max's mass of hair above her head on the mattress, and her stomach swoops giddily at the sight. Eager for those serious eyes back on her, she lifts her legs to wrap around Jane's waist, crossing her knees behind Jane's back and digging her heels into the back of Jane's thighs when the musician glances down at her absently. Whatever undoubtedly-pathetic look she has on her face makes Jane grin, as slow and warm as her kisses that Max is suddenly desperate to start again, and Max strains upward, unimpeded this time, when Jane leans her weight onto the forearms framing Max's face to press their lips together again.

They giggle together a bit between the light brushes, smiles almost too big to continue kissing, and Jane shifts just enough to remind Max that her thighs are still wrapped around the other woman's hips. "Jane," she says, but it comes out more as a sigh as she runs her sweaty palms over Jane's cheeks and down her neck to as much of her leather jacket's collar as she can touch without moving their chest apart. "What about this?" she says, breathless.

Jane hums, the sound sliding upwards questioningly as she dips her head to trail wet, open-mouthed kisses along Max's jawline.

Max's eyelashes flutter; she tilts her chin up into Jane's mouth helplessly, exhaling a few shaky breaths before she dares try to speak again. "Did you have all your clothes on in your fantasy?" she tries to joke, but her voice is too high-pitched and strained, and her words stumble on her slow, bruised lips.

Jane snickers and kisses her silent. While she's thoroughly, gloriously distracted Jane shifts her weight to her knees and wraps her hands around Max's on her chest, raising their joined fingers to rest above the tangled mop of Max's hair on the mattress so that their arms frame Max's face. "Not usually focused on what I'm wearing," Jane grins against her lips.

Max's whole body blushes, and her giggle is strangled awkwardly in her too-tight throat. She rolls her body, vibrating with too much energy to lie still, and the pressure of Jane's weight digging her wrists and lower back into the mattress makes every inch of her skin light up like she's touched a live wire. She squirms, hips working dreamily as molten heat pours through her body like lava to pool at the apex between her thighs where she is pressed desperately against Jane, but her movements only tighten the need coiling in the base of her stomach instead of relieving it.

Jane has mercy on her and leans down for a kiss, digging her teeth possessively into Max's lower lip as she lines up their bodies intimately. Max is just trying to remember how to pull air into her deprived lungs despite her too-full chest when Jane soothes the indent of her teeth in Max's lip with her tongue and sits up, rocking their joined hips as she leans back to kneel between Max's legs. Thoroughly distracted by the jolt of pleasure which spreads from the spot where they're joined through her whole body to curl her fingers and toes, Max takes a long few long, dizzy moments to blink away the stars behind her eyelids before she can lift them dazedly to see Jane drop her jacket onto the blankets at their feet and cross her arms to pull her t-shirt over her head in one seamless movement. The coil in her belly clenches, so hot it borders on painful, and it propels her upwards to wrap her limbs tightly around Jane's body and kiss her wildly. Jane gasps silently into her insistent mouth and pulls her fully back into her lap, one hand rising to Max's back and the other to the outer curve of her left thigh and scrambling over the skin like she's trying to touch all of it at once. Her commanding mouth takes control of the messy kiss, the way her tongue sweeps over Max's making her whole body curl deliciously, and Max drowns in her, so overwhelmed that her kisses slow drunkenly and she can only gasp into her mouth. Jane groans and licks her tongue one last time before tightening her arms around Max's quivering body and half-lifting her, lunging forward to pin Max against her headboard before kissing her deeply. Max can only hold on for dear life, legs shaking so hard they slide over Jane's despite her heels's desperate scrabble to find a foothold on Jane's backside as she pants into Jane's kisses. Jane's strong, lithe body crushing her so hard against the headboard she feels their breasts flatten against each other contrasting with the cool, smooth surface of the headboard makes her eyes roll back in her head, and everything she had been trying to do melts away with the molten heat in her belly and she only thinks Jane, Jane, Jane.

She must say her mantra out loud, because Jane whispers Max's name back against her saliva-coated lips and lifts one hand to tilt her willing face upwards for a deeper kiss. Jane's free hand slips around her back and unhooks her bra easily, palm sliding over her shoulder blades beneath the band to gently ease the material down one arm. The cups get caught between their chests, thin cotton sliding and bunching with the undulating of their bodies, and the friction of the material against her straining nipples and goosebump-covered skin makes a helpless moan rip from her throat, hips bucking mindlessly. Jane moans huskily, and the cotton against her inflamed skin is nothing compared to the feeling of Jane's firm, sweat-slicked breasts when she distracts Max for a split-second with a harsh nip to her neck and leans back just enough to rip the bra from Max's shoulders and toss it away before pinning her back against the headboard with her body. There isn't enough air in Max's too-full, burning chest to fuel the wordless, desperate sounds bubbling inside of her as Jane sucks at the curve where her neck meets her shoulder and wriggles one palm between their chests to cup one breast, but somehow they still pour from her lips as she arches into Jane's touch. Jane squeezes her breast and starts rocking her hips, forceful and steady as she brings her free hand to grip the fleshiest part of Max's hip to line up their thighs in a way which makes starts burst behind Max's fluttering eyelashes, and even if her abused lips can't form the words her inarticulate moans and her shaky breaths and the heartbeat pounding between her legs that echos through her whole body becomes her mantra of Jane, Jane,  _Jane_  -

She comes embarrassingly quickly, whole body quaking and falling apart in Jane's arms as her chaotic noises become one long, helpless wail. Jane is still holding her when she slowly finds her way back to herself, pink lips peppering soft, reverent kisses to her flushed cheeks and forehead as she patiently holds all of Max's body weight upright for her. Max takes in a slow, shuddering breath and opens her mouth to say something, hoping her clouded brain will come up with words by the time she's accomplished what feels like a Herculean task, but all that comes out is another high-pitched, hopeless whine, and Jane snickers as she dips in to cover it with a kiss.

"Always better than a fantasy," Jane whispers with a smile, and kisses her deeply as electricity crackles blindingly behind her eyelids.

After far more long, indulgent kisses than it should have taken for her brain to catch up to her, Max registers her words and pulls back from her lips so abruptly she knocks her head against the headboard behind her. "Oh, you were - ow, Jesus, really?" she mutters, raising one hand drunkenly to rub the back of her head, though she can't help but smile when Jane laughs huskily and cups the back of her head over her her own hand. "Well, as I'm sure is obvious from my smooth moves, I was going to say you were going to show me what  _you_  wanted."

"That was what I wanted," Jane says, eyes alight with the same molten heat Max still feels crashing through her belly as she leans their foreheads together.

Max laughs, mostly because she's still too weak to control her reactions. Her eyes drift closed as she rolls her head back into Jane's protective hand, slipping hers away to wrap around the back of Jane's neck. "God, Jane, can you stop being so goddamn hot for one minute and let me recover, here?"

"You're hot," Jane says quietly, eyes serious as she runs her gaze as far down Max's body as she can without moving away, and leans in for a deep, greedy kiss.

Max's heart stutters and starts racing so hard she's sure Jane can feel it as their chests slide together with their kiss. Jane kisses her again, and again, fingers weaving through the hair at the back of her head tight and possessive even though Max gives no indication that she's about to move away, and Max is the one to smile into the kiss this time, still-shaking thighs sliding to trap Jane's hips as the other woman presses her back against the headboard. "Jane," she sighs, and her vision flashes white when her lover pulls her hair inadvertently as her whole body wraps around Max's. "God. You know how you like watching my reactions to how good you make me feel?"

Jane doesn't respond, but her little gasp and the eagerness with which she peppers rapid-fire kisses down Max's chin to her neck is answer enough. Max hums, arching into her lips as one strong arm wraps around the dip in her lower back, and continues, "You are gorgeous, and I - oh - God, Jane, I lose my m - mind with how much I want you. I want you. Please -  _oh_  - Please. Jane. Please let me do that for you - please -" Her words break off with a gasp as Jane sinks her teeth into her collarbone, which is probably a good thing, since what was meant to be a seduction has turned yet again into a demonstration of how weak and desperate she is for Jane. Miraculously, Jane keeps trailing searing-hot kisses across her clavicle, sucking and nipping her other collarbone before pulling Max flush against her body into her lap and raising her head to brand her lips with a kiss. Her hands rise to cradle Max's burning cheeks, and when she pulls back just enough to exhale shakily against the redhead's lips she drags more pathetically honest words from them. "Show me. Show me how you want me."

She's on her back on the mattress before she knows what happens. Jane's kisses her sloppy, hurried and artless as she seems to try to start a new kiss before they've finished the last one, but Max is too drunk on her to do anything except moan and open her lips to her tongue. Jane has her weight balanced on one forearm beside Max's shoulder, and the other hand travels worshipfully over Max's thigh, caressing every inch of electrified skin before she gently pries it from its stranglehold on her waist. Once Max's leg falls from her back to the mattress, she slides up Max's prone body, the hard points of her nipples dragging headily against the pliable curve of Max's breasts, and her hand finds its way back into Max's hair, gripping the mussed waves with sweaty fingers as Max bucks and arches up, mouth gasping like a fish out of water as she searches for Jane's lips.

"You're so beautiful, Max," she has hoarsely, and she rolls them onto their sides and gently leads Max's lips to her neck.

Max lunges forward to press her lips against her throat greedily, using the momentum of their roll to press herself as close as possible as she peppers kisses over every inch of skin she can reach. Jane leads her along the curve of her neck with the hand in her hair, tilting her head back and curving her body into Max's to give her full access to the expanse of skin. Max can feel her swallow beneath her mouth when she slides her lips apart at the same time as her legs and hooks her thigh over Jane's hip, and her heart throws itself so wildly against her chest in its effort to reach Jane that she rolls them over when she follows it. She doesn't break her stream of kisses, wriggling her backside a bit more than is strictly necessary as she settles her dripping center over Jane's hips, and the hand in her hair flexes and pulls her so close that her nose flattens against Jane's throat. Jane's other hand rises to cup the curve of her ass and squeeze so hard it pushes her hips forward, and she makes that embarrassing high-pitched whine again as her lips reach Jane's collarbone.

Jane's hand in her hair leads her down the musician's body, guiding her enthusiastic lips and tongue over every dip and curve of Jane's torso. Jane bucks up into her when she sucks her straining nipple into her wet mouth so greedily she feels her cheeks hollow out, her tongue flicking over the sensitive tip between her lips before she has to release her to breathe. She's dizzily grateful for the hand in her hair gently showing her the path Jane wants over her skin, because each one of Jane's barely-audible noises or shifts of pleasure makes her want to stay and kiss that spot for the rest of the night. By the time her lips reach the button on Jane's trousers she's a panting, gasping, dripping mess, and it only takes a slight tug on her hair for Jane to summon her back up her body for a deep, drunken kiss.

"Max," Jane whispers into her lips, and gathers a mass of Max's hair at the back of her head as she drags the other woman down for another searing kiss.

"Don't you want me to - like you did, in my room?" Max asks, breathless, and then marvels at her own ability to blush even still.

Jane's eyes are glazed as they travel lazily over her face. "Next time," she says huskily, and the molten heat in Max's stomach coils so headily she's worried for a moment about whether a person can come simply from words before Jane pulls her back down for another needy kiss.

Jane weaves their fingers together and pulls her hand between their bodies as they kiss. They giggle a bit as they fumble blindly with the fly on her trousers, but they manage it eventually and Jane rolls her body into hers as they ease her trousers and underwear down her legs. Max pushes the material down Jane's shins and ankles with her toes, sighing as Jane sucks her abused bottom lip between both of her own, and even though Jane doesn't push her she sits up as she straddles her lover's thighs, running her tongue over her own lip as she settles over the other woman on shaking thighs. Jane is literally breath-taking, as her breath leaves her body while her eyes trail over her lover's body down the same path her lips had just taken, and she's so dizzy she almost forgets what she was doing until Jane raises one hand to cradle her cheek.

"Still okay?" she asks softly, eyes earnest even with the impossible, intoxicating want shining within them.

Max nods, leaning her cheek into Jane's palm for an indulgent moment. Jane reaches out with her other hand to slide their fingers together again, travelling the curves and edges of Max's chest and stomach this time before they reach the apex between Jane's legs. She moans, but Max is dazedly aware that whatever wordless sound she makes is much louder and more pathetic than Jane's noise of pleasure. She's so wet her downy curls and the insides of her thighs are coated with it, and Max's hips work pointlessly as she cups the dripping opening, swallowing a sudden excess of saliva at the half-formed thought of next time as she revels in the feeling on her shaking fingers.

"Fuck," Jane breathes. Her mouth works silently as her cheeks flush pink beneath her make-up, and her head finally falls back after a moment of struggle, neck arching off the bed.

"Jane," Max breathes without meaning to. Jane's fingers interwoven with hers slacken, and she eases her hand away, sliding her palm down to cup her without barriers. With a sudden spike of anxiety she wishes this, of all the parts, was the one Jane could guide her through, but Jane's reaction makes her drunk enough to press forward blindly. She rubs her palm along the opening, trying to remember what Jane had done to her, and Jane's hum and shift of her hips gives her a boost of cautious confidence. She massages the outer folds for a few strokes, a bit too dazed by the vision in front of her to think of anything else, and when the heel of her hand slides through her slickness and finds her clit she shivers and moans as much as her lover does. Her mind slows, but she doesn't panic; that intoxicating freedom Jane seems to exude as easily as breathing is dripping over her skin like come and sweat, and she finds a rhythm, rocking her hand over her lover's soaked folds and chasing each twitch and buck and moan Jane gives her worshipfully. Her fingers tease Jane's inner folds open and curl inside, and she's so distracted when Jane reaches up to pull her on top of her and kisses her sloppily that she just leaves the digits still for a few long, mindless moments. Jane reaches down and wraps her fingers around her wrist to gently lead her head in a rhythm again, and their kiss falls apart as Jane starts panting heavily and Max is so lost in the heavenly velvet her fingers are buried inside that she can only moan against Jane's lips.

Jane doesn't make noise like Max does when she comes; she screams with her body, her lithe form tensing all at once beneath Max as she flushes down to the top curve of her breasts. She arches and jerks, mouth lolling open as her eyes squeeze shut, and Max moans loudly enough for both of them as she feels Jane's orgasm against her body and over her fingers. Spellbound, Max doesn't quite know what to do with herself, so she presses greedy kisses over Jane's face and down her neck, breathing her name over and over as she waits for her lover to come back to her.

When Jane does come back to her, breathless and flushed and impossibly beautiful against the messy sheets, she lifts her hand before she opens her eyes, finding Max's cheek to lead her down for a sloppy, needy kiss, and Max presses closer and stops thinking about fantasies.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for anyone still reading this!!! I don't have time on the computer to answer comments but I'll be back to post again soon for my other fic so know I appreciate all of you!!!<3


	10. Chapter 10

The soft, tinkling sound of the keyboard slowly, slowly permeates the heavy fog of sleep in her mind. She drifts with it, the flowing stream of notes glowing in her mind's eye as she feels the runs across her sleep-warmed flesh like a caress, before she realizes that the glowing behind her eyelids is from the neon signs in Jane's bedroom and lifts her lashes at the mere, irresistible thought of her nearness.

It takes her a few blearly, slow blinks to find Jane. The sky outside the wide windows of her bedroom is black, the only lights illuminating the small bedroom the humming neon signs she seems to keep plugged in no matter what time of day it is, and the small room seems to be made up of dark, misshapen shadows in the dim light. The musician is hunched over her keyboard with her back to Max, wearing a baggy, worn t-shirt and nothing else, head bowed as she watches her curved fingers move expertly over the keyboard in apparent deep concentration. Max watches her with sleepy eyes, awed, until the spell of the music is broken for a jarring moment when Jane lifts one hand from the keyboard to scribble onto the sheet of paper on the music stand above the keyboard. She blushes with her whole body, both from the heady writhing in her belly which only seems to dance for Jane and from embarrassment at watching her lover with besotted admiration like she's a screaming fan at a concert, and she has to wriggle around beneath the blankets she's cocooned herself in while sleeping before she manages to slide her bare feet off the bed and onto the cold floor.

Jane has started tapping out her intoxicating melody by the time Max has retrieved her wrinkled t-shirt from the floor. The dull  _thunk_  of the keys is louder than the music they're producing, the volume is turned so low, and now that she's fully awake and trying to focus on the pattern of the music she can't quite catch the individual notes. Jane doesn't stop playing when she pads over and sinks onto the piano bench so close the outer curves of their bare thighs slide together just enough to make her heart pick up speed, but she glances up with a half-smile so devastating Max is dizzily grateful she's already sitting down so that her knees can't give out from beneath her.

"Did I wake you up?" Jane murmurs in a voice almost as quiet as her keyboard, somehow continuing the arpeggio she's playing without stumbling even as her dark eyes flicker over Max's face appreciatively.

"No," Max says, even though she probably had. Her voice crackles with sleep, and she feels herself flush, ducking her head automatically to let her long, hopelessly-tangled hair hide her face. Jane snickers and lifts one hand from the keyboard again, this time wrapping it around Max's waist to pull her closer as her other hand keeps running across the keys almost unconsciously, and Max's whole body flushes for a different reason as she allows herself to lean into the embrace.

"What time is it?" she whispers. There's no one else in the room with them, so there's really no reason to keep her voice down, but the moment feels private, intimate, like they're the only two people in the universe, and feels like the only appropriate response.

Jane shrugs, glancing out the window in front of them to the sky as dark and endless as her eyes as the hand still on the keyboard slides into low, resonating chords without breaking stride. "Late," she says.

Max nods, not really sure what answer she'd been expecting. Jane doesn't have a clock in her room, or anywhere in the band's apartment from what Max has seen, and she seems to operate by her own whims rather than any sense of a schedule, so Max doubts that she or any of the punks are terribly concerned with time-keeping. Max is so used to the rigid routine of school that she still isn't able to adapt to this unstructured existence, eating and sleeping and making love at whatever hour of the day the mood strikes her, and she hasn't quite figured out whether the feeling is  more freeing or stressful.

"What are you playing?" she asks instead, leaning her chin on Jane's shoulder to watch her hand dance across the keyboard with interest. She feels the hem of her t-shirt bunch up against her hip as she wriggles closer, and she tries not to wince outwardly as the pulse between her legs reminds her that she hadn't put on underwear.

Jane's lop-sided smile is soft, and she glances at Max almost shyly before her intoxicating eyes fall to her meandering hand once more. "Don't know yet. It's new."

"Oh," Max breathes. Her heart flutters in her chest, and she can't even be embarrassed about the obvious eagerness in her voice as she leans forward to watch Jane's hand move as if it will help her hear the new melody better. The volume is still so low she does actually pick up the notes a bit more clearly, and Jane lifts her hand from the dip of her waist to turn the knob on the keyboard until her still-flowing notes are audible without Max having to practically press her ear to the keyboard speaker.

"Do you always compose in the middle of the night?" Max teases, tucking herself back into Jane's side at the slight press of her lover's hand against her ribs again, even though she's sure Jane can feel her heart racing against her. "I guess inspiration never wants to strike at a convenient hour, when you're already awake."

"Haven't slept yet," Jane says, watching her hand trail along the keys before it slips off the edge of the instrument to curl around one of Max's thighs. "Inspired." She dances her fingers across the top of Max's thigh like she'd been dancing them across the keyboard, and Max can't help the sharp intake of breath she has as electricity crackles across every inch of her skin from the slight brushes of Jane's fingertips. Her thoughts race almost as fast as her heart, trying to determine what Jane could mean, since she couldn't possibly mean what her pathetically hopeful, lovesick mind immediately latches onto and refuses to let go of, and then she stops thinking of anything at all when Jane tightens the arm wound around her waist and half-lifts her off the bench, pulling her so close she's practically sitting on one of the musician's bare thighs.

"Do you want to hear it?" Jane murmurs into her ear, leaning her forehead against Max's temple as her hand glides ceaselessly along the freckled thigh now atop her own.

Thankfully, the thousands of half-formed thoughts and emotions she's feeling get lodged in her throat beneath her heart, and she can only nod. Jane squeezes her thigh and pulls back just enough to smile at her, almost as if she hadn't been sure Max would say yes, and turns back to the loose papers she's scrawled symbols Max doesn't recognize across drawn lines. Both of her strong, musician hands lift from Max's body, regretfully, but Max can't quite find it in herself to complain when they settle across the keys to play without moving Max from the possessive circle of her arm still around the redhead's back.

The song is slower than her band's usual music. Max has noticed, having listened obsessively to their tapes over the summer that they were apart, that the songs Jane's influence is most apparent usually has more emphasis on the melody than the pounding drums or angry lyrics of the rest of their songs, giving her the freedom to showcase her intertwining melodies and complex runs on the piano. Max has always connected more with lyrics than pure melody, but the emotion Jane puts behind her music, the same way she does with her looks and touch and every knee-quaking thing about her, makes Max feel what she's trying to express beyond what any poetry or lyrics could ever convey. Max has felt this through the songs she's heard before, the undeniable force of Jane behind songs her band has performed even when Kali is the only one singing. Hearing it unfiltered, Jane's strong, unshakable presence shaping every string of heady, beautiful sounds her long fingers coax from the keyboard as effortlessly as they do from Max's own body, makes the now-familiar carnal dance in her belly start to rock her hips and shake her thighs, and although she waits until Jane has lifted her hands from the piano, she's not completely sure the song is finished before she throws herself the rest of the way into Jane's lap and kisses her fiercely.

Jane seems to be finished with her song, since she kisses Max back without hesitation. Max moans helplessly into her mouth when she tightens her strong grip around her back and lifts her, rising from the piano bench with Max wrapped in her arms. Max wriggles her hands up and over her chest to cradle her face in an effort to pull her closer, even though their lips are so mashed together their teeth scrape a few times, and mindlessly wraps her thighs around Jane's waist when the musician cups her backside to support her weight. Whether from losing her balance from Max's wriggling, or the feeling of her legs encircling her lithe body, Jane groans and turns to stumble blindly towards the bed, practically throwing the clinging woman onto the mattress as soon as her knees hit the edge. Max's thighs are still wrapped greedily around her waist, and she bounces back onto the mattress still half-attached to her lover, already reaching for her even before her back has collided with the flat surface. Jane wastes no time in following her down onto the bed, and just the glimpse of her dark eyes burning down at her before she swoops down to kiss her again makes Max's legs weaken so much she can barely keep them fastened around her lover.

It takes Jane a few tries to successfully pull away from Max's greedy lips, and by the time she finally does back away, panting so heavily her dripping, pink lips hang open, she still hovers close enough that her heavy breaths puff against Max's blushing cheek. "This, off," Jane whispers, voice gravelly, and she yanks the hem of Max's t-shirt up and over her head in one smooth movement. Max can only roll her body, arching up into her lover in the vague direction that the garment is being pulled, and she lunges upwards to attach herself to Jane's addictive lips once more as soon as she's freed of her clothing.

Max wraps all of her limbs around Jane's torso as they kiss, but Jane presses her deliciously into the soft mattress with her weight and starts sliding down her body, and Max's desperate grip loosens as heat melts every muscle in her body down to the liquid pooling between her legs. Jane's searing pink lips break away from hers to begin travelling down her body, branding open-mouthed kisses down her chin to her neck as her hard nipples drag along Max's sensitive breasts. Max's eyes roll back into her head as Jane's lips reach the valley between her collarbones, and, as she can't seem to form words, she tries to express to Jane, the same way her lyric-less music had conveyed more than words ever could, how badly she needed her lover with only the desperate movements of her body.

Thankfully, Jane seems to understand her body better than even she does, and she presses greedy, hurried kisses over the hills and valleys of Max's writhing body, pressing her rocking hips down into the mattress with one patient hand, and only makes her wait the length of one, shaky exhale when she reaches her dripping curls before she dips her head between her thighs. Max cries out, arching her whole body into Jane's mouth when she digs her talented keyboardist fingers into Max's fleshy hips and presses an open-mouthed kiss to her soaking opening, but Jane doesn't pause in the glorious sliding and teasing with her lips even as she digs her blunt fingernails into Max's skin to keep her where she wants her. Unlike the first time she's tried this, where she'd taken her time exploring and testing Max's reactions, she dives into making love to Max enthusiastically, sucking and mouthing at her sensitive folds like she's trying to taste all of her at once before her tongue sweeps the full length of Max's lower lips up to her clit. Max bucks, feeling the moan escape her thick throat more than hearing it through the ringing in her ears, and Jane only pulls her closer, sweeping her tongue over her most sensitive flesh again and again as she holds Max flush against her face, before she flexes her hands against Max's curves and sweeps her tongue between Max's outer folds.

Max wails. She can already feel the hot coil tightening in her belly, the familiar pressure only Jane can inspire in her building with every pass and swirl of her tongue. She'd known from the moment Jane had kissed her that she wouldn't last long, and Jane doesn't seem to want her to, relentless with her lips and tongue and possessive grip sliding from her hips to the curve of her ass. Writhing, dripping, begging, Max comes against Jane's mouth, losing her hold on reality as her vision whites, certain the only thing keeping her on the bed is Jane's unshakable hold on her backside.

She finds she's panting as she starts to sink back into her body, giddy and buzzing with so much energy she's surprised she's not vibrating herself off the of the mattress, but Jane is, apparently, not finished with her; Jane's lithe, breath-taking body is covering hers before she can fully open her eyes, and she barely has time to sigh the one syllable of Jane's name before a warm, solid palm cups her dripping curls. She makes a mindless, throaty sound and tosses her head, bucking her hips instinctively into the pressure, and Jane's hand slides over her opening to nudge two fingers through her outer folds. Blinding, buzzing lights burst behind her eyes, and she gasps shakily, writhing uselessly on the bed as she tries to arch up into Jane's body and finds her limbs still too weak and shaky to support her weight.

"Too much?" Jane says, voice hoarse even as her fingers pause between Max's legs.

Max whines, rolling her head back onto the nest of blankets beneath her as she struggles to sort through the fog clouding her brain and find the words to beg Jane to  _keep going_. She rocks her hips jerkily, smearing herself against Jane's hand, and she can't even be embarrassed about the strangled noise she makes as Jane presses the heel of her hand into the soaked curls experimentally. Her lips work uselessly a few times, slick with both of their saliva, until Jane gives a gutteral groan and ducks down her body to sink her teeth into the curve where her neck meets her shoulder, and she blurts out, "God, don't stop, please," the words tumbling over each other like they'd been caught in her throat and were trying to burst out all at once.

Mercifully, Jane doesn't make her wait any longer. She's so wet her lover's fingers glide inside of her without resistance, and, the residual buzzing of her last orgasm, coupled with the heady, relentless rhythm Jane starts with her hand, make her whole body tense and release with the coil in her belly as soon as her hips start to rock, and she's coming like she'd never stopped. Stars burst and burn behind her eyes, her spine lights up like a string of Christmas lights as she arches it helplessly, and the grateful prayer of Jane's name is suffocated when she can't catch her breath as she comes again, and again, and again.

Jane doesn't play her any more piano music that night, but as she's finally sinking into an exhausted sleep, she feels her lover's fingers dancing along the curve of her thigh, and she falls asleep to beautiful, wordless harmonies echoing in her clouded mind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't usually do dedications on this story, but this chapter is for endlessly-wonderful yuzu, @yuzuyuri!!! happy birthday MONTH, I hope this is everything you dreamed for a dek chapter!!! i wish i had more time to gush about how much i love you but i've got to post this before i get kicked off the internet *again* so i hope you enjoy my lil birthday offering and have a birthday as lovely as you are!!!<3  
> speaking of loving i'm going to answer comments as soon as i have time on the computer, i love and appreciate every single one of you!!!<3

**Author's Note:**

> Series title is from Rock Show by Halestorm (I know they're modern but it's all I listen to when I write this so it's at least the theme) and the fic title is from Dead End Justice by The Runaways. I'm so bad at titles I'm just using punk songs alghjshjslaljf
> 
> More Constellations coming soon, every kudos and comment makes my whole day so thank you!!!<3


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